Gulliver’s Travels Anniversary

This month a very famous novel turns 300 years old. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was published in October 1726. Did you know that it is the most-read book by any Irish author? It is sometimes today read in a child’s version, which of course leaves out much of the story and all of the satire, but it was a book intended for adults, which satirises the politics and society of Swift’s day, in an incredibly biting way.

In the book, Lemuel Gulliver travels to strange lands – he meets the tiny people of Lilliput (hence our word ‘lilliputian’), then the giants of Brobdingnag. In Laputa he meets utterly impractical intellectuals, then finally in the land of the Houyhnhnms he meets rational, kind and civilised horses who live alongside human-like creatures called ‘Yahoos’ (hence our use of that word for a rude, uncultured person). Swift wrote the book “to vex the world rather than divert it”, and he achieved just that for, as well as adding words to our dictionaries, the book caused huge controversy. It was accused of being blasphemous, misanthropic, misogynistic, overly harsh and pessimistic. It was published only seven years after Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and was partly written in response to that book, which Swift felt was far too optimistic. Others loved what they saw as the ‘truth’ of its narration.

Gulliver’s Travels has been turned into film and TV versions, comic books, radio plays, and sequels; it has inspired composers and, as a proto-science fiction novel, it has hugely influenced sci-fi novelists. There’s a tiny brand of cigar known as a Lilliput, and the same name applies to the smallest fitting of a light bulb. In Holland very short people (are there any very short people in Holland, the tallest nation on earth???) are known as ‘Lilliputter’.

Happy 300th birthday Gulliver’s Travels! It’s not every day you get to celebrate the 300th birthday of a novel, as the genre was still in its infancy. The James Joyce Centre in Dublin has been running a six-week course on the novel (which could be attended online, but it started last month), Trinity College in Dublin is holding a special Gulliver exhibition in the library, a Cambridge Anniversary Edition of the book has been published, Keio University in Japan is also hosting a special exhibition, and an International Symposium will be held in London. The Hungarian postal service released four stamps to commemorate this literary anniversary.

To celebrate, you might like to read or reread the novel, or read the excellent biography by Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World. If you can get to Dublin, then do pay your respects at his grave in St Patrick’s Cathedral.