Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), 1726
A ship’s surgeon washes up among tiny people, giants, flying scholars and talking horses, and discovers how strange his own country looks from outside. A witty, satirical voyage through strange societies, with an eighteenth-century voice and a steady sense of wonder.
Feels like wonder. About society, power and nature.
Who it’s for
You may enjoy it if you like satire that uses travel and invented societies to poke at politics and human vanity. The prose is eighteenth-century and some of its political jokes assume context, so it can feel slow in stretches.
Why read it
It lets you see familiar customs and power struggles from an alien angle, and the wit still lands.
Pages from the book
How a breakfast habit became a cause worth dying for.
Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion: It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers; whereupon the emperor, his father, published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. A king is offered the secret of gunpowder and refuses it.
The king was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. He was amazed how so impotent and groveling an insect as I (these were his expressions) could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines; whereof, he said, some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. As for himself, he protested that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or in nature, yet he would rather lose half his kingdom than be privy to such a secret, which he commanded me, as I valued my life, never to mention any more. A machine that promises to write books without talent or thought.
The first professor I saw was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame, which took up the greatest part of both the length and breadth of the room, he said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations. But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble exalted thought never sprang in any other man’s head. Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas by his contrivance the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labor, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study. Jonathan Swift.Swift, a Dublin clergyman, published Gulliver’s Travels anonymously in 1726; it was an immediate hit and was soon printed in pirated editions across Europe.
Books that feel like this
More by Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World
Jonathan Swift, 1726
A ship's surgeon keeps washing up among miniature courtiers, giants, absent-minded scientists and rational horses, and each country shows human folly from a new angle. It is still the sharpest satire in English.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Gulliver's Travels for me?
- You may enjoy it if you like satire that uses travel and invented societies to poke at politics and human vanity. The prose is eighteenth-century and some of its political jokes assume context, so it can feel slow in stretches.
- What is Gulliver's Travels like?
- A witty, satirical voyage through strange societies, with an eighteenth-century voice and a steady sense of wonder. Feels like wonder. About society, power and nature.
- What should I read after Gulliver's Travels?
- If you liked Gulliver's Travels, try Journey to the Center of the Earth (Jules Verne), Short Fiction (Saki) and Candide (Voltaire).
A taste of the feed
How to describe a massacre as though reviewing a parade.
There was never anything so gallant, so spruce, so brilliant, and so well disposed as the two armies. Trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon made music such as Hell itself had never heard. The cannons first of all laid flat about six thousand men on each side; the muskets swept away from this best of worlds nine or ten thousand ruffians who infested its surface. The bayonet was also a sufficient reason for the death of several thousands. The whole might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery.
Candide · Voltaire
A demon's professional failing is liking the people he's meant to ruin.
He rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon. Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.
Good Omens · Terry Pratchett
Seeing your own dinner party through a guest's eyes, and wishing you hadn't.
That was the secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily, turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table, studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he preyed on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the opposite end of the long bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring good-looks, of a jeweller’s window lit by electricity. And between the two, what a long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people were!
The House of Mirth · Edith Wharton
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