Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), 1726
★ 3.59 from 306.4k ratings on Goodreads
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. Swift's dry, restless humor turns each strange country into a brisk argument about pride, power and human folly.
Feels like humor, curiosity and unease. About society, morality and power.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy satire that uses travel and fantasy to test ideas about society and morality. The eighteenth-century sentences and dense political references can slow the reading, especially in the longer philosophical stretches.
Why read it
Its shifting perspectives make familiar politics and manners look absurd, and the wit still gives you a useful way to question authority.
Pages from the book
Five ways to start a war, none of them requiring a reason.
“Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretend to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrels 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. It is a very justifiable cause of a war, to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves. A proud list of everything war does, recited as a boast.
And being no stranger to the art of war, I gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea fights, ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side, dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses’ feet, flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases, left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning, and destroying. And to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him, “that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead bodies drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the spectators.” Shrunk to a court toy, a man begins to see his own class differently.
But as I was not in a condition to resent injuries, so upon mature thoughts I began to doubt whether I was injured or no. For, after having been accustomed several months to the sight and converse of this people, and observed every object upon which I cast my eyes to be of proportionable magnitude, the horror I had at first conceived from their bulk and aspect was so far worn off, that if I had then beheld a company of English lords and ladies in their finery and birth-day clothes, acting their several parts in the most courtly manner of strutting, and bowing, and prating, to say the truth, I should have been strongly tempted to laugh as much at them as the king and his grandees did at me. More passages from Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World
Jonathan Swift.Swift published it anonymously in 1726. His publisher, Benjamin Motte, quietly cut and altered passages he feared were too dangerous, and the full text did not appear until a Dublin edition in 1735.
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More by Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift, 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.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy satire that uses travel and fantasy to test ideas about society and morality. The eighteenth-century sentences and dense political references can slow the reading, especially in the longer philosophical stretches.
- What is Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World like?
- Swift's dry, restless humor turns each strange country into a brisk argument about pride, power and human folly. Feels like humor, curiosity and unease. About society, morality and power.
- What should I read after Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World?
- If you liked Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, try Candide (Voltaire), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) and The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas).
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
What silence feels like when it isn't loneliness.
This second night we run between seven and eight hours, with a current that was making over four mile an hour. We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed—only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all—that night, nor the next, nor the next.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · Mark Twain
The particular agony of walking into a room where everyone already knows each other.
It was, then, into the midst of this tumult and disorder that our young man advanced with a beating heart, ranging his long rapier up his lanky leg, and keeping one hand on the edge of his cap, with that half-smile of the embarrassed provincial who wishes to put on a good face. When he had passed one group he began to breathe more freely; but he could not help observing that they turned round to look at him, and for the first time in his life d’Artagnan, who had till that day entertained a very good opinion of himself, felt ridiculous.
The Three Musketeers · Alexandre Dumas
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