Gulliver never stopped travelling

To the English novelist E.M. Forster, Gulliver’s Travels was ‘Robinson Crusoe in Fairy Land’. For George Orwell, a staunch devotee of the book, Jonathan Swift’s crowning masterpiece was an attack on humanity, written by a man he described as ‘a Tory anarchist’ – one who was ‘presumably impotent and had an exaggerated horror of human dung’.

In the 300 years since its publication in 1726, Gulliver’s Travels has beguiled and entertained generations of readers and even received what might be the ultimate cultural accolade, by graduating to become a children’s book, something so familiar that its destination is the nursery.

It didn’t start out like that.

To return to Forster, Gulliver’s Travels was published just six years after Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which appeared in April 1719 and was an immediate success, running to four editions before the year was out.

While we don’t know for certain, it’s probable that in the same way that modern cinema would have no Austin Powers without James Bond (or Harry Palmer), Swift’s riff on the castaway epic re-invented by Defoe is both a parody on the genre of pseudo-travellers’ tales, as well as an excoriating satire on the state of humanity and the failings of early 18th-century Western European society.

In almost every area of life – from marital and family relations to education, morality, God, the affairs of government and international relations, Swift uses Gulliver to expose the widespread failings, greed and foolishness that he could see at every turn.

His description of the legal profession from Part IV, when Gulliver spends three years in the utopian land of the rational, morally pure horse-like Houyhnhnms is a case in point:

‘I said, there was a Society of Men among us, bred up from their Youth in the Art of proving by Words multiplied for the Purpose that White is Black, and Black is White, according as they are paid. To this Society all the rest of the People are Slaves.’

It is just the beginning of a thoroughly enjoyable diatribe – and one of the many swipes taken at lawyers in the book.

Later, he introduces the peaceable Houyhnhnms to the alien concept of war:

‘Sometimes one Prince quarrelleth with another, for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a War is entered upon, because the Enemy is too strong, and sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes our Neighbours want the Things which we have, or have the Things which we want; and we both fight, till they take ours or give us theirs.’

Yes, this is where Machiavelli meets Yes, Minister, and for the reader it’s utterly delicious. That is the joy of Gulliver’s Travels.

During Part I, the most well-known section of the book, shipwrecked Gulliver washes up in the miniaturised kingdom of Lilliput. When the royal palace is burning down the accidental giant saves the day by resorting to the only source of water readily at hand: he urinates liberally all over the palace, dousing the flames but earning the enmity of the queen. If it’s funny today, imagine how it went down in the vertiginously hierarchical world of Georgian England.

For modern readers there is an especially rewarding section where Gulliver casts a withering eye over colonialism, which in the 1720s was almost as in vogue as supposedly real-life travellers’ tales. ‘A Crew of Pirates are driven by a Storm to they know not whither’, writes Swift as he explains how it works. ‘They go on Shore to Rob and Plunder; they see an harmless People, are entertained with kindness, they give the Country a new Name, they take formal Possession of it for their King, they set up a rotten Plank or Stone for Memorial, they murder two or three Dozen of the Natives, bring away a Couple more by Force for a Sample, return with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the first Opportunity, the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free Licence given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust, the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants; And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People.’

Quite so. Then, as Orwell put it in his essay of 1946, Politics v. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gives ‘the final tap to the nail’: ‘But this Description, I confess, doth by no means affect the British Nation, who may be an Example to the whole World for their Wisdom, Care, and Justice in Planting Colonies; their liberal Endowments for the Advancement of Religion and Learning; their Choice of devout and able Pastors to propagate Christianity, their Caution in stocking their Provinces with People of sober Lives and Conversations from this the Mother Kingdom; their strict regard to the Distribution of Justice in supplying the Civil administration through all their Colonies with Officers of the greatest Abilities, utter strangers to Corruption; and to crown all, by sending the most Vigilant and Virtuous Governors who have no other Views than the Happiness of the People over whom they preside…’

And so Swift goes on, taking to task seemingly every facet of human life through his ‘Travels into several remote nations of the world’. Having fled the island Empire of Lilliput, where the enlarged Gulliver allows for a full-square mockery of the miniaturised version of Britain with the ceremony, emperor, court and politics, he escapes to its mortal enemy Blefuscu (France). Among the oddities of Lilliputian society is a fierce division over the eating of boiled eggs – between the ‘primitive’ big-enders and the small-enders, a rift caused by the minor injury sustained by the son of an emperor when breaking his egg at the larger end. A resulting imperial edict ‘commanding all subjects, upon Great Penalties’ that all eggs should henceforth only be broken from the smaller end had led to ‘six rebellions… wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his Crown’. Swift adds: ‘It was computed that eleven thousand Persons have, at several times, suffered Death, rather than submit to break their Eggs at the smaller End… [and that] the Books of the Big-Endians have been long forbidden, and the whole Party rendered incapable by law of holding Employments.’ This was a reference to the Test Acts of the 1670s, which barred Catholics and Nonconformists from public office.

Returning home, the doctor goes back to sea and after a storm, heads to an unknown shore to obtain water. He is now at Brobdingnag, where Swift reverses the Lilliputian lens to miniaturise our traveller putting him in a land of giants. After various mishaps he ends up at the court of the king and queen, where he explains the workings of England’s state and society in detail. After which the king tells Gulliver: ‘You have made a most admirable Panegyric upon your Country. You have clearly proved that Ignorance, Idleness and Vice are the proper Ingredients for qualifying a Legislator… I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.’

Turning now to Orwell’s nail, Swift leans on the Crusoe-conceit of the true-life tale and declares: ‘Nothing but an extreme Love of Truth could have hindered me from concealing this part of my Story. I was forced to rest with Patience while my noble and most beloved Country was so injuriously treated.’

In Part III Gulliver arrives at the flying island of Laputa and Balnibarbi, before moving on to Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan. Laputa, a land of philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers, floats by means of a lodestone above its dominion of Balnibarbi. Here, if a town rebels or refuses to pay its taxes the king can move his island directly over it to deprive it of sun and rain – and if they continue in their revolt then ‘the last Remedy’ is ‘letting the Island drop directly upon their Heads’.

The visit allows Gulliver to visit the Grand Academy of Lagado for the lampooning of the Royal Society and the scientists of his day. One had spent ‘eight years upon a Project for extracting Sunbeams out of Cucumbers’, another is attempting to ‘reduce human excrement to its original Food, by separating its several parts’, while a third treats Colic by blowing wind into the rectum of a dog using bellows. The dog does not survive.

The examples illustrate two themes that are abundant in the book – first, Swift’s obsession with excrement and his appreciation of what we would now call lavatory humour. (Consider the School of Political Projectors in Lagado where one professor claims he can determine people’s secret thought from their faeces, ‘because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool’.) The second theme is Swift’s recurring abhorrence for science or progress.

Gulliver next travels to Luggnagg, where those paying court on the king are required to crawl towards him on their bellies and then to ‘lick the dust before his footstool’. Sometimes extra dust is thrown down or even poison in order to execute wayward nobles. ‘But’, writes Swift, ‘in justice to this Prince’s great Clemency, and the care he hath for his Subject’s Lives, it must be mentioned for his Honour, that strict orders are given to have the infected parts of the Floor well washed after every such Execution.’

Luggnagg also boasts a race of immortals, or Struldbruggs, which permit Swift to enlarge upon the ‘dreadful Prospect of never dying’. ‘Whenever they see a Funeral, they lament and repine that others are gone to an Harbour of Rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive’, writes Swift, who notes that the state dissolves marriage for couples at 80 because ‘a perpetual Continuance in the World, should not have their Misery doubled by the Load of a Wife’.

Gulliver eventually finds happiness in the final part of the book, in the land of the Houyhnhnms, a kind of Planet of the Apes where intelligent horses instead of great apes lord it over a race of disgusting, primitive brutish humans, called Yahoos. Here there was ‘neither Physician to destroy my Body, nor Lawyer to ruin my Fortune; No Informer to watch my Words, and Actions, or forge Accusations against me for Hire’ and no word or concept of evil, either. Gulliver decides he likes it so much here that wants to stay, but he is forced to leave because as a Yahoo he cannot continue to live with his host, a Houyhnhnm. So he returns home, but it takes him a year to get over his repulsion of the loathsome humans/Yahoos – even his wife and family. ‘I must freely confess the sight of them filled me with Hatred, Disgust and Contempt… when I began to consider that by copulating with one of the Yahoo species I had become a Parent of more, it struck me with utmost Shame, Confusion and Horror.’ Not for nothing did Orwell regard Gulliver’s Travels as evidence of Swift’s ‘general hatred of humanity’.

If hatred is strong, it can’t be denied that Swift diverged in the most strenuous terms with many of the ways in which human society was configured, particularly in the Anglo-Irish landscape he inhabited. When he wrote Gulliver’s Travels between 1721 and 1725, Swift was in his mid-fifties, an ordained Anglican minister, serving as dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. In her 1998 biography of him, Victoria Glendinning noted that his description of the Yahoos was possibly inspired by the ‘ragged, degraded, and, to him, savage Irish peasantry’ that he saw on his travels.

What has been commented upon is that, despite his religious calling, Swift did not appear to evince much in the way of religious faith. ‘Did Swift believe in God?’ asks Glendinning. ‘Many of his ecclesiastical superiors suspected he did not… He often used ‘the generalised term “Providence” instead of “God”: a common evasion. I think he wanted to believe.’

Against this backdrop is the rather mysterious world of Swift’s personal life. Described in 1716 by the Archbishop of Dublin, William King, as ‘the most unhappy man on earth’, Swift was born in Dublin in 1667 to English parents who had fled there after the Civil War, and was said to be able to read the Bible at three. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, before moving to be with his mother in Leicestershire after the Glorious Revolution in 1688 amid fears of sectarian violence. He secured a position as secretary to the diplomat and politician Sir William Temple, which is where he met William III, who apparently taught him how to cut asparagus properly (offering shades of big and small-endianism). His ambitions for a high position in the church were brought short by his satirical essay, A Tale of a Tub, which is said to have earned him the disapproval of Queen Anne, while any political aspirations were ended by the Whig Supremacy and the Hanoverian succession, after which Swift left London, his home from 1710-14, for the deanery of St Patrick’s, his Tory patrons and allies now firmly ousted from power.

There were at least two women in his life. Esther Johnson, known as Stella, whom Swift met when she was 11 at Temple’s home in Farnham, Surrey, in around 1690. In the years that followed, with Swift acting first as her tutor, they formed a close bond and then in 1701, when she was 20, she travelled with her sister to live close to him in Dublin. It was the continuation of what would be a ‘violent friendship’, one which may or may not have included a secret marriage and lasted until Stella’s death at 48 in 1728. Little is known, except as Glendinning puts it: ‘He [Swift] was the most important person in her life. She was the most important person in his life.’

Which, though true, misses out on Swift’s affair, if that’s the term, with Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he named Vanessa, and which inspired another of his greatest works, an allegorical poem Cadenus and Vanessa (cadenus being an anagram of the Latin word, decanus, for dean). They met in 1707 when she was around 19 (Swift would have been 40) and would meet in London. Then, after Swift returned to Ireland in 1714, Vanessa followed, much to his dismay. Her presence in Dublin put Swift’s relationship with Stella under pressure and the tension was not resolved until Vanessa’s death from tuberculosis in 1723 at 35. What transpired between them is unknown, though Glendinning’s guess is that ‘maybe they somehow consummated their affair once, and that the act established Vanessa’s lasting fixation’ and Swift’s regret. We don’t know, but we do know that it wasn’t conventional.

In his lifetime he said he would only marry if he could support a family – and we do not know what the final barrier to a more fulfilled private life was. Whether or not this was the source of his turmoil, it’s impossible to determine. But it might, as Orwell observed, point towards the peculiar utopia of the Houyhnhnms that concludes the travels of Lemuel Gulliver. ‘The dreary world of the Houyhnhnms was about as good a Utopia as Swift could construct, granting that he neither believed in a “next world” nor could get pleasure out of any certain normal activities’, wrote Orwell, whose own allegorical satire, Animal Farm, lives firmly in the shadow of Gulliver’s Travels.

Animal Farm is far from being alone. In the three centuries since its publication it’s impossible not to see the legacy of Swift’s masterpiece around us. Most obviously it’s there in Jules Verne (1828-1905) whether you’re thinking about Journey to the Centre of the Earth or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A generation later it’s apparent in H.G. Wells (1866-1946), whose Swiftian muscles are flexed in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The First Men in the Moon (1901), but also in the creation of the sinister Morlocks and Eloi in The Time Machine (1895). Move on half a century and we have Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek in the mid-1960s, who took us to the far reaches of space to tell us more about ourselves. ‘Swift wanted to write about his times, but he would have had his head chopped off if he talked about stupid kings and queens, [and] crooked prime ministers’, declared Roddenberry. ‘He decided to create a place where he could talk about such things and get away with it. So I started thinking, “Well, maybe if I could have all my stories happen on far off planets then I could talk about those things I wanted to talk about.” Star Trek came fairly easily after that.’

I expect it did: Captain Kirk is Gulliver at Warp speed.

It is in the nature of pioneers that they become part of the cultural fabric to be copied, adapted, co-opted – just as Swift himself built on the work of others, not least the Roman-era satirist Lucian, who gave us the story of travelling to the Moon more than 1,500 years before. What remains surprising today is the sheer vivacity and perspicacity of Swift’s critique and the pleasure it gives the reader.

You can almost see him wiping away the tears of delight as he wrote it. Anyone who finds so much joy in the egregious folly of human beings can’t really be such an unremitting misanthrope. ‘I do not hate Mankind’, Swift told his friend, the poet Alexander Pope, ‘it is vous autres who hate them because you would have them reasonable animals, and are Angry for being disappointed.’