The pitch
Lemuel Gulliver is a competent, unimaginative ship’s surgeon with a wife in Redriff and a
habit of going back to sea, and over sixteen years he is shipwrecked, marooned, abandoned
and set adrift into four countries that should not exist. In Lilliput he is a mountain
tethered by ropes, dragged into a war over which end of an egg to break. In Brobdingnag he
is six inches tall, kept in a box, and everything from a wasp to a monkey is trying to kill
him. On the flying island of Laputa the noblemen are too busy thinking to hear anyone speak,
and in the academy below a man is eight years into bottling sunlight from cucumbers. Then he
lands among horses who reason, keeping a race of filthy human animals for labour, and works
out — slowly, and then all at once — which species he belongs to. He comes home and cannot
bear his family. It is 300 years old, it is very funny for about two thirds of its length,
and the last part is one of the angriest things anybody has ever written.
What to know
Two things surprise people about this book. The first is that it is not a children’s story
and never was: Swift was a Dublin dean writing a political attack on the England of 1726,
and the Lilliput everybody knows is one quarter of it. The second is how hard the sentences
are. Published measures put it at 1300L and ATOS 13.5, higher than our Robinson Crusoe, and
the AR quiz for the unabridged text is worth 25 points. Shopping for it is where families
get caught — nearly every “Gulliver’s Travels” on a shelf is Lilliput on its own, or an
adaptation: the Stepping Stones version sits at 590L, and the D.C. Heath school edition,
which is the one Gutenberg carries with pictures, prints Parts I and II and stops. Ours is
the complete text — all four voyages, thirty-nine chapters, the two pieces of front matter,
and the Lindalino episode that was suppressed in the first printings and not restored until
1735. It is plain: the one illustrated edition of the whole book on Gutenberg quietly cuts
about 4,700 words of Swift, every one of them a passage somebody found coarse, so we took
the complete text and the cover instead. There is exactly one picture in here, and it is the
book’s own — the diagram of the word-machine at Lagado, printed in the first edition, which
the prose sends you to look at. Swift’s chapter arguments are set apart under each chapter
number the way the printed page sets them, so you can see where you are going. Read the
content note before handing this over; the difference between Part I and Part IV is enormous
and it is the whole design.
Life when written
Swift was about fifty-eight and living in Dublin as Dean of St Patrick’s, a post he
considered a punishment. He had wanted a bishopric in England, had been a political
insider under the Tory ministry until Queen Anne died in 1714, and had watched the Whigs
come in and his career end. What he did with the exile was write. In 1724 he published the
Drapier’s Letters anonymously, arguing that a patent granted to an English ironmonger named
William Wood to mint copper halfpence for Ireland was a swindle; the campaign worked, the
patent was withdrawn, and a reward of £300 for naming the author went unclaimed, because the
printer would not talk and neither would Dublin. He was writing Gulliver’s Travels during
exactly those years, and the rebellion of Lindalino in Part III — a city that fights off a
flying island by putting loadstones on its towers — is that fight, with the serial numbers
filed off. He sent the manuscript to London in 1726 by way of a friend who dropped it at the
publisher’s door at night, and the printer softened the sharpest passages before setting it,
which is what Gulliver’s furious letter to Cousin Sympson at the front of this edition is
complaining about. It sold out in a week. Swift’s own line, in a letter to Alexander Pope,
was that he wrote it “to vex the world rather than divert it.”
