Image source, Alamy
Since its publication in 1726, the adventure novel "Gulliver's Travels", written by Jonathan Swift, has undergone repeated abbreviations, modifications and re-quotations. Are the events of the novel "a pessimistic and misanthropic criticism" or just a "children's fairy tale"?
The story of Lemuel Gulliver may be familiar to you. He is a person who wakes up after being shipwrecked, to find himself tied to ropes and surrounded by the dwarves of Lilliput, who are climbing on his immobile body.
This scene has been repeatedly published and ridiculed in various forms since the novel was published three centuries ago.
However, a small number of readers may be familiar with the darker side of Gulliver's adventures, when the novel's hero encounters scientists who insert blowers into dogs, or a society of talking horses, both rational and deadly, known as the "Huyhnhnms," who are quietly thinking about eliminating what they know as the "Yahoos," their companions in society who are human in nature and savage in appearance.
Over the past three centuries, since Swift began his work to “bother the world, not amuse it,” as he wrote, two Gulliver pictures have competed to shape the public imagination: the first a misanthropic diatribe satirizing the monarchy, the church, and English politics, the other a children’s fairy tale about an adventurer who experiences worlds great and small, moving between them.
The original novel, Gulliver's Travels, is full of innuendo-based humor and criticism of the legal system, colonialism, and human nature. The novel ends with a bleak ending, with Gulliver developing an intense disgust for humans after meeting the rational Houyhnhnms, and spending his last days locked in a stable with a horse.
Since its first edition, Swift's novel has undergone abbreviations, changes, adaptations, and modifications, until the story becomes larger than life itself, just as Gulliver seemed in the land of Lilliput.
“It (the novel) is perhaps one of the most quoted texts in the world,” says Daniel Cook, author of “After the Life of Gulliver: 300 Years of Transmedia Adaptation.” The novel spawned spin-offs, drawings, plays, and films, all of which contributed to the emergence of a broad phenomenon called “Gallifreana.”
Most read end
Among the various adaptations were the works that worked to simplify the novel and purify it of its shocking details, which became more deeply rooted in the popular imagination than others, as its darkest episodes were deleted, shortened, or removed completely.
“I doubt that Swift would have imagined that Gulliver's Travels would survive into the 21st century in the form we know it today,” says Abigail Williams, a professor of English literature at King's College London, who once hired an FBI expert to decipher absurd words in Swift's letters.
She adds: "Swift intended Gulliver's Travels to be a critical series related to the issues of his time, and a general criticism of the human race, not some kind of adventure story."
"That's what's really extraordinary," she says. "He makes fun of 'adventure stories,' but he draws enough energy from them that Gulliver's Travels becomes an adventure story on its own."
From criticism to myth full of adventures
Image source: Getty Images
An in-depth explanation of the most prominent events and topics, to help you understand the most important variables around you and their impact on your life
Episodes
End podcast
Swift's friend and contemporary, John Gay, famously described the novel as "read everywhere, from the cabinet to the nursery." When the novel was published under a pseudonym in 1726, as a precaution in view of its scandalous and daring content, it was a great success, and the first edition quickly sold out. Its fantastical elements appealed to young readers as much as its satire of humanity appealed to the literary circle and intellectuals.
The French writer and philosopher, Voltaire, was in London, and he greatly enjoyed reading “Gulliver’s Travels,” which left an impact on his satirical novel, “Candide,” a novel about maturity and character formation.
However, the novel had already begun to be edited, with the publisher, Benjamin Mott, adding passages that included a defense of Queen Anne, who was on the throne at the time, and deleting some of the more controversial political passages. The reissue of Gulliver's Travels in inexpensive booklets, known as folktale books, further simplified and changed Swift's story.
“The book was too expensive for most people when it first came out,” Williams says, but the booklets have been an unexpected hit among younger readers.
Half a century later, two decades after Swift's death in 1776, a publisher recognized a commercial opportunity. Francis Newbery issued an abridged version of the novel, condensing its events further and omitting the Laputa voyage, whose absurd experiments aimed at extracting sunlight from cucumbers mocked the Royal Society's scientific research. He also left out the community of talking Houyhnhnm horses entirely.
This edition was more of a fairy-tale adventure story than a work of criticism, as its focus was on Gulliver's adventures among the inhabitants of Lilliput and Brobdenagh, and it may have been convenient for young readers not to see Gulliver's diminutive description of the blisters and sores that covered the bodies of the giant Brobdenagh, or his allusions to the ways the Queen's ladies entertained in her chambers, or his attempts to extinguish a fire in one of Lilliput's palaces by urinating on it.
Such scenes, Cook says, “continued a long literary tradition of vulgarity, a tradition we find in Shakespeare and Chaucer,” but they were considered, perhaps justifiably, unsuitable for children.
By the 1790s, abridged editions had become the dominant style of the novel, and Gulliver's Travels was much more successful in continental Europe than in England. “The novel was quickly translated into German, French, and Spanish, and those translations tended to be the simplified version,” Cook says. “So the work transcended language barriers.”
Over time, cultural and religious differences contributed to deepening the contrast between the novel’s images, and it turned into a strange parody full of scenes of physical horror, on the one hand, and into a playful fairy tale directed at children, on the other hand.
"An all-out attack on humanity"
Although the Victorian era was not as puritanical as is commonly believed, the Victorians "extremely abhorred Gulliver," according to Grant, and their most objectionable idea was that mankind could be reduced to savage Yahoos in the land of the Houyhnhnms.
In his 1853 book The English Satirists of the Eighteenth Century, William Makepeace Thackeray, author of The Vanity Market, described the book as “vulgar in its language, vulgar in its ideas, angry, and obscene.”
As for the Victorian writer and critic, Edmund Gosse, he concluded that Swift's "misanthropic genius" could have arisen only from a diseased mind, saying: "His vertigo had become chronic, and so had his tendency to misanthropy, there is something to suggest that his mind was not under complete control."
Historian Hester Grant says: "The Victorians saw the novel as inconsistent with the Christian spirit, and they rejected the obscene themes and sexual elements it contained, and they also rejected its dark and persistent tendency toward misanthropy. So I think they bore a great deal of responsibility for purifying it and stripping it of what they saw as ugly criticism, and preserving that beautiful, pure work of fiction."
According to Cook, this fourth voyage was seen as an “all-out attack on humanity,” and it was its seemingly anti-religious nature that truly shocked readers.
"Swift says we're like Yahoo," Cook says. "People found it acceptable to make fun of politicians' triviality on the first voyage. We all know that politicians are useless. But the fourth voyage is different, in that he attacks the very foundation of what it means to be human."
He adds: "It is not a coincidence that when we read the children's version of Gulliver's Travels, we find that it does not go beyond the first and second voyages. We do not, in fact, get a complete quote from the work."
It is worth noting that Swift himself wrote the sentence with which he wanted to commemorate him on his grave, which said: “Where violent indignation is no longer able to tear the heart apart.” Despite the imaginative character and richness of the concepts that characterize “Gulliver’s Travels,” there is no way to deny that sense of indignation that constitutes the driving force of the novel.
Like the war that erupts in the novel between two factions over the correct way to break eggs, the issue of Jonathan Swift's supposed hatred of humanity remains a subject of heated academic debate. There are those who believe, like Thackeray, that Swift actually harbored a hatred for the human race, while others see the character of Gulliver, with his limited understanding, as the real target of ridicule.
"Gulliver's Travels" represented the peak of Swift's literary creativity at the end of his career, after he had long ago gained a prominent position as a brilliant satirist and political activist for the Conservative Party in Westminster, and that period was seen as his glory years, when he wrote political publications with wide influence, and communicated with senior figures and prominent leaders in the Conservative Party.
This luxurious life ended with the death of Queen Anne in 1714, when the ministry in which Swift was serving collapsed. Grant says that Swift “lamented his loss of political influence” and felt that he had not received what he deserved. After he had hoped to obtain a high and comfortable position within the Church of England, he was only rewarded by being appointed Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, a position that Swift practically viewed as a kind of banishment.
“This had a huge impact on Gulliver’s Travels, with its criticism of the royal court and talk of ingratitude and betrayal,” Grant says.
Although Swift was born in Dublin, his relationship with Ireland was complicated, as he described his native country as “a wretched and filthy place, like a dog’s den and a prison,” and “a place fit only to die.” Nevertheless, he became one of the most prominent advocates of Irish independence from England, a position reflected in his political writings and in parts of “Gulliver’s Travels,” such as the part about the flying island of Laputa, which subjects the inhabitants of Balnebarbie to its control and threatens to crush any An uprising in their capital, Lindalino, which represents Dublin in the novel.
This criticism was highly controversial for the publisher, so he deleted it from the first edition, thus ruling out the novel's criticism of colonial domination. However, Grant sees this position as evidence that Swift was a social reformer seeking to change the world through satire, and not just a critic of humanity in its abstract form.
Grant says: "He depicts humanity at its most horrific, because he wanted to awaken his reader from the state of lethargy that allows a person to continue living his daily life, while horrific events occur around him. He shakes us violently, as if he is hitting us on the head, saying: This is your reality. Do something to change it."
Today, the legacy of “Gulliver’s Travels” is great, as it is one of the most studied English novels of all time, but at the same time it may be one of the least understood, due to the many quotations from which controversial passages were revised and deleted.
Its vocabulary also infiltrated linguistic dictionaries, and its use extended to the digital age, where a term such as “Endianness” appeared to describe the arrangement of bytes in computer systems, and the name of the search engine “Yahoo” also appeared. In fact, artificial intelligence seemed to have been anticipated by Swift, to some extent, through his vision of a huge machine operated by a manual crank, which he called the “knowledge engine,” that produced books and mathematical operations without requiring the user to have any specialized expertise.
Perhaps the events of the twentieth century were a reason for the return of the original journeys to the circle of research and study, as a number of literary figures, from George Orwell to Sylvia Plath, cited the text. Orwell described Swift as a “conservative anarchist” who saw in his “angry and pessimistic” novel an anticipation of modern totalitarianism, through the upside-down utopia, devoid of joy, in which the “Hoyheim” society lives.
Whether it is the original criticism or its many revised versions, cleansed of the bold passages, and whatever Swift's intentions, Gulliver's Travels has transcended the limits of the work for which it was written, becoming a phenomenon larger than its original text.
The English novelist, Rudyard Kipling, says that Swift "tried to indict all of humanity, but he left us a children's book."
Perhaps Swift would have found in the ongoing controversy and the successive transformations that occurred in his novel something that aroused his amusement and displeasure at the same time.
“I think he would have felt despair,” Williams says. “He was very critical of the simplification and flatness of contemporary culture, but this text itself plays with misunderstanding, as does much of Swift’s writing.”
"Perhaps Swift would have enjoyed the fact that people misunderstood his work," she adds.
Find out more
Short clips
End of short clips
