book review of gulliver's travels in 100 words

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Gulliver’s travels by jonathan swift [a review].

book review of gulliver's travels in 100 words

Lemuel Gulliver, a young man from Nottinghamshire, has considerable difficulty setting himself up in life. Unable to afford a Cambridge education, he becomes an apprentice surgeon, then serves as ship’s surgeon on a voyage of three and a half years. Returning to England, he marries and tries to set up a practice in London but still can’t earn enough to sustain himself and so sets off on voyage again aboard the Antelope .

Shipwrecked after a storm somewhere in the eastern Indian Ocean (or western Pacific Ocean), Gulliver manages to swim to shore and collapses from exhaustion. When he awakens, he finds he has been tied to the ground. Little people, not six inches high, are crawling all over him, speaking to him in a language he does not understand. When he tries to get up, they sting him with their arrows. Apparently great engineers, they load Gulliver onto a contraption to wheel him into their capital city, Lilliput, where they chain him.

While the Lilliputians discuss how to feed him, take care of him and what they are ultimately to do with him, Gulliver learns their language. He learns about their culture and customs, their systems of government and justice. The Lilliputians release Gulliver with a set of conditions and Gulliver tries to make himself amusing and useful to them. When a fire breaks out at the palace, Gulliver promptly puts it out by urinating on it which does not amuse everyone!

Gulliver also learns of Lilliput’s enemy – Blefuscu – the France to Lilliput’s England. Gulliver plans and carries out an attack on Blefuscu, snaring their entire navy together and pulling it away. But Gulliver stops short of annihilating Blefuscu and will not allow Lilliput to subjugate them.

Not long after, Gulliver learns of a plot to eliminate him and that articles of impeachment have been drafted against him. Most concern his refusal to destroy the Blefuscudians and suspicions as to why, but his urinating on the palace is still offensive to some.

WHEREAS, by a Statute made in the Reign of his Imperial Majesty Calin Deffar Plune, it is enacted, That whoever shall make water within the Precincts of the Royal Palace, shall be liable to the Pains and Penalties of High-Treason: Notwithstanding, the said Quinbus Flestrin [Gulliver], in open breach of the said Law, under colour of extinguishing the Fire kindled in the Apartment of his Majesty’s dear Imperial Consort, did maliciously, traitorously, and devilishly, by discharge of his Urine, put out the said fire […]

Gulliver escapes Lilliput, finds a boat and, with the help of the Blefuscudians, makes it ready to sail. With luck, he is found by an English ship returning from Japan and makes his way home. But Gulliver spends only two months with his wife and children before he decides to sail again.

In all Gulliver survives four voyages to bizarre lands and lives to tell the tale. He visits Brobdingnab where, in the converse of his experience of Lilliput, Gulliver is tiny and everyone in Brobdingnab is gigantic relative to him. On his third voyage he encounters flying islands and witnesses the folly of pursuing science for its own merit and of immortality without eternal youth.

His final voyage seems to have had the most impact on Gulliver. He finds himself in the land of the Houyhnhnms where humans are unintelligent animals and it is a species of horse that are intelligent. Explaining the ways of humans to the Houyhnhnms – of war and lawyers, money and trade – leaves Gulliver disgusted with his own species and he resolves to find a deserted island to spend the rest of his life.

I was chiefly disgusted with modern History. For having strictly examined all the Persons of greatest Name in the courts of Princes for an hundred Years past, I found how the World had been misled by prostitute Writers, to ascribe the greatest Exploits in War to Cowards, the Wisest Counsel to Fools, Sincerity to Flatterers, Roman Virtue to Betrayers of their Country, Piety to Atheists, Chastity to Sodomites, Truth to Informers. How many innocent and excellent Persons had been condemned to Death or Banishment, by the practising of great Ministers upon the Corruption of Judges, and the Malice of Faction. How many Villains had been exalted to the highest places of Trust, Power, Dignity and Profit: How great a share in the Motions and Events of Courts, Councils, and Senates might be challenged by Bawds, Whores, Pimps, Parasites, and Buffoons: How low an Opinion I had of human Wisdom and Integrity, when I was truly informed of the Springs and Motives of great Enterprises and Revolutions in the World, and of the contemptible Accidents to which they owed their Success.

Though he is persuaded to return to England he can barely stand the company of his own species, even his own family.

Gulliver’s Travels reminded me of a couple of other books I have read. The first is Don Quixote by Cervantes. Gulliver is very satirical and full of political allusions. It would probably be fair to say that the novel is mostly a vehicle for making such satirical and political points. Swift covers Torys and Whigs, Catholics and Protestants and various British and European monarchs in veiled and naked references. For example, during Gulliver’s Lilliput adventure, allusions are made to Charles I, the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Carteret, the Duchess of Kendal and several other political figures and events.

[The King] was perfectly astonished with the historical Account I gave him of our Affairs during the last Century, protesting it was only an heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments, the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce. […] then taking me into his Hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these Words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in [: …] I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many Vices of your Country. But, […] I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.

At times it verges on the cynical. For example, Gulliver’s third voyage experiences of witnessing people pursuing science for its own sake and not for practical purpose, of ‘absurd’ research and of being so obsessed with it that they are themselves absent-minded and clumsy is apparently a dig at the Royal Academy and at Newton.

Gulliver’s Travels is very clever in its satire and a reader can’t help but admire its wit and imagination. But, like Voltaire’s Candide , this aspect to the story may have lost its relevance over time and may only endure in general terms. Coupled with the fact that it is not the most engrossing read, it reminded me of Don Quixote in that my admiration for the skill of its satire was almost matched by the effort that I had to make to keep reading it.

It helps that the story at times moves very quickly with little build up. It also helps that the story, especially the first voyage to Lilliput is often funny as well.

Another Professor showed me a large Paper of Instructions for discovering Plots and Conspiracies against the Government. He advised great Statesmen to examine into the Diet of all suspected Persons; their times of eating; upon which side they lay in Bed; with which hand they wiped their Posteriors; To take a strict view of their Excrements, and from the Colour, the Odour, the Taste, the Consistence, the Crudeness, or Maturity of Digestion, form a Judgement of their Thoughts and Designs. Because men are never so Serious, Thoughtful, and Intent, as when they are at Stool, which he found by frequent Experiment: For in such Conjunctures, when he used merely as a Trial, to consider which was the best way of murdering the King, his Ordure would have a Tincture of Green, but quite different when he thought only of raising an Insurrection or burning the Metropolis.

The other book Gulliver reminded me of was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe , for a couple of reasons besides the obvious one of both being first-person accounts of far-off adventure. Firstly, like Robinson Crusoe , Gulliver was one of my favourite stories from childhood. Unfortunately, my love for them may only be for the abridged children’s versions I read as a child and will not transfer to the original texts. The original versions still contain the essence of what made these stories compelling for me as a child, whether it was the fantastic settings and events or the appeal of the characters. But that leaves long periods of story that are less interesting, written in English that is a little difficult for the modern reader.

Which brings me to the second thing they have in common. Robinson Crusoe (first published in 1719) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) both represent early forms of the novel in English and should be understood in that context. They are the literary equivalent of watching silent film and ought to be appreciated and respected for the ground they broke but are understandably less engrossing to modern readers. An example for how the passage of time impacts the reading of Gulliver comes from the words used (the edition I read is based on the 1726 first edition). In almost any book from the past the writer will be using words that are unfamiliar to us or using them in unfamiliar ways. In Gulliver I found this to be more extreme; sentences that seem perfectly sensible to a modern reader actually have a very different meaning because one familiar word, still in use, is being used with a very different meaning no longer in use.

Otherwise the two works contrast each other quite strongly. Crusoe is a self-sufficient individualist who masters his predicaments though the use of reason and who tries to make the reader believe his story by emphasising its realism. Gulliver, whether in London or a fantastical land, is a somewhat impotent person, sceptical of reason and encourages the reader to doubt the veracity of whatever they read with his dubious tale.

Robert Demaria Jr, a Professor of English at Vassar College, echoes some of these thoughts of mine in his introduction to the Penguin black classic edition I read. He suggests that Gulliver’s Travels is more of a satire than a novel or a story, but its storytelling qualities explain its durability and repeated adaptation even though the satire is often lost in such retelling.

Demaria describes Swift’s deep involvement in politics during a tumultuous time including the execution of Charles I, the Tory crisis and the death of Queen Anne. Swift only wrote Gulliver’s Travels after leaving his political life behind, suggesting that the fictional medium was a safer place for him to say what he thought. Despite this Demaria cautions readers for assuming that Gulliver, his thoughts and beliefs, are a reflection of Swift, saying the relationship between the two is complex.

The original Gulliver’s Travels may have been a little disappointing to me having been fond of an abridged version in childhood. Its format and style is not very difficult given its age, but it may not be very engaging to a modern reader and most of the targets of its satire have ceased to be relevant. Still, it ought to be appreciated for the ground it broke and the inspiration and influence it provided future satirists, two in particular that I have read recently – Butler’s Erewhon and Voltaire’s Candide .

Book Review: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

July 6, 2018 By Jessica Filed Under: Book Review 2 Comments

Gulliver's Travels

'I felt something alive moving on my left leg ... when bending my Eyes downwards as much as I could. I perceived it to be a human Creature not six inches high' Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself on Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters - with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and the brutish Yahoos - give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour. Swift's savage satire view mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with an uncompromising reflection of ourselves. This text, based on the first edition of 1726, reproduces all its original illustrations and includes an introduction by Robert Demaria, Jr, which discusses the ways Gulliver's Travels has been interpreted since its first publication.

Gulliver’s Travels immediately reminded me of the Princess Bride. They are both travel novels that make fun of travel novels by having the author retell someone else’s story but edit out the things they don’t like from the “original” story. For Princess Bride, it was pages and pages of packing and unpacking from the fictional novel it’s based on. For Gulliver’s Travels, it was “innumerable passages relating to the winds and tides… (pg 9-10)” although some overly technical passages were left in for kicks and giggles. Another hilarious stab at travel novels was when Gulliver says, “This is enough to say upon the subject of my diet, wherewith other travellers fill their books, as if the readers were personally concerned whether we fared will or ill. (pg 215)” I wonder how many travel novels Jonathan Swift read before he thought, “Shut up about the food!!”

Part I is about the little people and is obviously the most famous part of Gulliver’s Travels, but I didn’t realize that their trees and animals were small, too. Cute! I was surprised by the dark humor in this part, but I enjoyed it. The best example is when the little people discuss the problems of killing Gulliver and the huge carcass that they would have to deal with and the awful plague that would probably come from it.

The little people going through his things and describing them had me as confused as they were. I couldn’t figure out what some of the things were, either, because this book was so old. But their descriptions were delightful.

We saw a hollow pillar of iron, about the length of a man, fastened to a strong piece of timber larger than the pillar; and upon one side of the pillar, were huge pieces of iron sticking out, cut into strange figures, which we know not what to make of. -Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (pg 35)

The little people took themselves way too seriously. They pick their leaders based on tight rope walking and not actual skills. This strange scene led me to Sparknotes where I learned that Gulliver’s Travels was a political satire. I just thought it was a fairy tale. It’s enjoyable as both though it’s less confusing when I knew what he was making fun of. Now I get the tight rope walking thing-it’s about politics and power. Throughout the book, some of the social commentary seemed universal and some seemed to go over my head since I didn’t know some of the context of the time period. The footnotes in this Penguin edition helped a lot.

I couldn’t believe the audacity of the little king asking Gulliver to let them poke his eyes out and calling it lenient. Gulliver says he must not be smart because it seemed the opposite of lenient to him. That’s because it’s not lenient!! Gulliver actually considers doing it because they did give him a nice noble title. I can’t imagine in what universe a noble title would be more useful than your eyes (and I’m pretty sure that’s the point.)

I was also shocked by Part II . I was familiar with the part where he becomes small in a land of giants. But they do whatever they want to him since he’s small including the women playing with him naked. Um…what?! His reaction is to be repulsed by their smell and blemishes that he can now see because of his size. This was disturbing on so many levels (luckily it’s short and not graphic.) According to Sparknotes , the microscope was new at the time and they were interested in the small details of things that actually made them gross.

The political satire became more and more blatant (even without reading Sparknotes, I knew the dispute about the eggs in Part I was referring to Catholics and Protestants) with ironic criticisms of the places he visited, like this example for the giant king in Part II:

He confined the knowledge of governing within very narrow bounds, to common sense and reason, to justic and lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and criminal causes; with some other obvious topics, which are not worth considering. -Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (pg 126)

A more indirect criticism of English politics is when the king doesn’t want to learn about gun powder from Gulliver because he says must have been invented by Satan (which was actually an idea from Milton, according to the footnotes). The king from part II is the one who says this famous quote:

“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” -Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (pg 123)

Part III was the strangest part and the least familiar to me. The society is full of people called flappers who are always getting the attention of people by flapping them with a padded stick so they know when to talk and when to listen. The whole society seemed as zoned out as someone who is severely addicted to their smartphone. The flappers were weird, but maybe they would be useful today going around whacking people when they are on their phone too much. Just a thought.

As strange as part III is, I found it the most relevant. The whole section is a satire on technology. They have such high and unrealistic aspirations that they neglect the present. The experiments they did were absolutely crazy like extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. But according to Sparknotes , all the experiments mentioned were either proposed or actually carried out at the time this was written. After reading this section, I couldn’t help but think that we often use technology to come up with unnecessarily complicated solutions to things or that in the pursuit of advanced technology, we’ve come to neglect basic things. We value innovation at the expense of maintenance .

Allow me to geek out about one interesting fact. In Part III, Jonathan Swift made a fictional predition that Mars had 2 moons that turned out to be true. So cool!!!

Part IV probably had the best wisdom and advice. He visits a utopia populated by intelligent horses. I listened to the audiobook read by David Hyde Pierce and it was delightful, especially in part IV where he pronounces all the horse words like a horse would – neighing and all. Probably my favorite tidbit of wisdom from the horses was when Gulliver was explaining wars. He talks about the reasons and that the worst wars were caused by different opinions especially if they were about “things indifferent. (pg 226)” Sad, but true.

I found this to be another piece of good advice:

He could not understand why nature should teach us to conceal what nature had given; that neither himself nor family were ashamed of any parts of their bodies. -Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (pg 219)

I was surprised that they believed at the time that depression only hit the lazy, luxurious, and rich. They believed hard work was the cure. I’m glad we know more about depression now and this isn’t true. However, this old fashioned perspective reminded me that the lazy and luxurious lives we as modern people does not always make you happy. I would rephrase his statement and replace “depression” with “unhappiness” and it’s a good reminder to me that hard work is more likely to make you happy than laziness.

What’s this? Is that a flash of feminism in this book written over two hundred years ago? The horses thought it “monstrous” that women were educated differently than men. It made half the population “good for nothing but bringing children into the world. (pg 247)”

At the end when Gulliver finally makes it home, instead of trying to improve society from what he learned from the horses, he despairs that the world he lives in isn’t as perfect as theirs and does nothing. He becomes almost crazy by talking to horses and becoming disconnected with his family. It’s quite a jarring ending to a fairy tale. I didn’t like it at first, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that maybe his point was that we often give up when things need to be fixed. We read satires or the news and see the many, many problems in the world and make no effort to fix any of them because we can’t fix them all. And honestly the society of horses that he thinks is so perfects sounds downright boring. No family connections, all logic, no emotions etc. Even so, I wished Gulliver had at least tried to do something. What a great insight, though. Don’t be like Gulliver – do something .

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Book Review Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift

About Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for Whigs then for Tories), and poet, famous for works like Gulliver's Travels , A Modest Proposal , A Journal to Stella , The Drapier's Letters , The Battle of the Books , and A Tale of a Tub . Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. Swift published all of his works under pseudonyms — such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier — or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire; the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

Classics Club

October 20, 2020 at 9:10 pm

I just am finishing up Gullivers Traveld. Our Classics book club will be discussing it this Saturday. I found your review and absolutely loved it! I will be sharing it with our book club and will definitely give you props!

I too loved part three the best in the book! Your techno observation of that Section was great!

Looking forward to following you on Instagram!

May 13, 2021 at 11:01 am

Well thank you! I read this book for my book club as well and we had a lot of fun talking about it. I hope your book club had fun too!

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Gulliver’s travels by jonathan swift | book review.

Posted by: Editor October 29, 2011 in Author , Books , Classic , English 78 Comments Updated: May 12, 2015

First published in 1726, this collection of Lemuel Gulliver’s fascinating voyages all over the world, has been loved, read and re-read by every child and adult familiar with the English language. The story appealing the children for its fictional quotient made of wonderful creatures ranging in size from a few inches to several feet, flying island, etc. and to adults for its keen representation of human nature and European society. The witty and satiric style of Jonathan Swift’s narrative has an universal appeal to every intelligent reader while the circumstances and surroundings aid in accomplishing the tale by providing the elements of fantasy and thrill.

Gulliver’s Travels – Book Cover (Published in year 1900)


Author		Jonathan Swift
Publisher		Wordsworth Classics (Dec 1999), Harpercollins (2010) and Others

A short introduction in form of a letter by Gulliver to his readers precedes the travel chronicles, which comprises of four parts, each containing Gulliver’s experiences in a different land. Following is the synopsis of each story:

Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput (4 May 1699 — 13 April 1702)

Gulliver, a surgeon on a merchandising ship, finds himself to be the lone survivor after a shipwreck on an unknown shore where he falls asleep out of weariness. The next morning, he wakes up to find himself bound by tiny threadlike ropes and surrounded by a crowd of people, less than 6 inches high. After a while, “the Lilliputians” are convinced of his being harmless to them and slowly Gulliver gets accustomed to the people and the place. His observations of this race and their way of living, their king and his court, Gulliver’s accommodation and way of living form the next few chapters of the book. Gulliver also assists the king in a war with their enemies, the Blefuscidians, by depriving them of their entire feet but refuses to help the king in enslaving them. This and the strong dislike for him by some of the king’s ministers bring on Gulliver the dislike and penalty of the king. To escape from this, he runs away to the island of Blefuscu, from where he manages to leave the country in an abandoned boat. A passing ship rescues him and brings him back to England.

Gulliver’s travels – English movie
Jajantaram Mamantaram – A Bollywood movie (in Hindi and English)

Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag (20 June 1702 — 3 June 1706)

Gulliver ventures to a sea voyage again on a ship called Adventure which facing a storm goes off course and is forced to land at an island for fresh water. Gulliver goes on the shore and finds himself abandoned while roaming around as his fellow shipmen are driven away from the land by a monster. On the island he finds himself with the race of giants with height more than 70 feet. A farmer brings Gulliver home where his daughter nurses him. The farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. The Queen of Brobdingnag takes a liking to Gulliver and buys him off along with hiring his nurse as governess. Gulliver becomes a favourite of the royal family and discourses with the king at length about his native country and the rest of mankind. Though treated kindly, he keeps encountering many ridiculous accidents due to his puny size. Finally, one day, when on sea-shore, a giant eagle takes away Gulliver’s wooden house with him inside and drops him in the sea, from where he is rescued by some sailors and comes back to England.

Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan (5 August 1706 — 16 April 1710)

This time, Gulliver’s ship is attacked by pirates who force him to leave the ship and the guy finds himself on a desolate rocky island, from where he is rescued by the inhabitants of a flying island, called Laputa. The description that Gulliver gives of the Laputians, is a strong caricature of that of musician and mathematicians, describing them as totally impractical race dwelling in the theoretical arts only. Laputa flies over a bigger island called Balnibarbi by virtue of its magnetic properties. Gulliver describes the people, the king and his kingdom, and his method of ruling from sky. He next ventures to visit the capital city of Lagado and its grand academy where all kinds of disgusting, ridiculous and fruitless research work is done.

Waiting for a ship to go to Japan, Gulliver takes a short trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib, which is inhabited by magicians. The chief of magician has power to bring back the dead and Gulliver enjoys conversations with all his favourite philosophers, politicians and other great men from history of his choice. In Luggnagg, he comes across immortals called struldburgs and for the first time starts considering the problems that immortality will bring in form of old age and infirmity. Finally, he goes to Japan, and from there to England with an intention for staying home for the rest of his life.

Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms ( 7 September 1710 – 2 July 1715)

But the sea calls Gulliver again, and he starts his journey as a captain of a ship. During the voyage he loses some men due to illness and is forced to recruit others from different places, who finally turn the crew against him. This band of seamen is going to become pirates and hence casts away Gulliver in a landing boat. On this island, he first encounters a deformed, hideous and savage race of animals and later the masters of this land, apparently horses with advanced and reasoning intellectual capacity, who call themselves Houyhnhnms. The savage race is nothing but uncivilised and brute humans known as “yahoo” on this island.

Gulliver becomes a member of the horse’s household, and slowly becomes extremely fond of their lifestyle and way of thinking, realising all the follies and vices of humankind during his conversations with his master horse. He reloves to spend rest of his life on this island but the Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization, and expels him.

He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is surprised to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous and generous person. He returns to his home in England, but he is unable to reconcile himself to living among Yahoos and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.

Gulliver’s Travels is often considered to be a children’s book, mainly due to the wide publicity and popularity that the first part of the novel describing Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput has received. But, the book in reality, is a reflective and mufti-dimensional work that addresses and represents many a traits of the human nature and human society. The chronicles are full of metaphors and the best part that links these together is the change of perspective. In every part of his voyage, Gulliver encounters a different race i.e., small, big, scientific and eccentric, wise and natural, and hence, starts viewing himself and rest of his brethren with a different point of view, identifying the evils in the human society and their root causes step-by-step. At the end of his voyages, Gulliver is a changed man, so much so that he abhors the mankind in general.

The book consists of ever-lasting wisdom and though the metaphors become crude and complex, especially in the last part, is still a worthy read. “Gulliver’s Travels” is one of those books that never lose its contemporariness …

Enjoy… 🙂

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it was a very useful review for school projects. sincere thanks to the concerned. regards atira

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Too lazy to be a writer – too egotistical to be quiet, ‘gulliver’s travels’ by jonathan swift (review).

***** Gulliver’s Travels is a collection of satirical travel tales by Irish writer Jonathan Swift , and ever since its release in 1726, it’s been a favourite of readers wishing to escape the tedium of everyday life. The novel takes the form of several accounts of visits to unknown lands, undertaken by ship’s surgeon Lemuel Gulliver at the start of the eighteenth century, and while in some ways the hapless traveller is to be pitied for his bad luck in being repeatedly shipwrecked, abandoned and cast adrift, the adventures that result from his misfortune are among some of the most famous stories in the English language.

You see, when we say ‘unknown lands’, we’re not talking about Australia here, but incredible realms where life is rather different to that which we’re accustomed to. On his very first voyage, Gulliver lands in trouble, waking from a long sleep to find himself in a tricky situation:

I attempted to rise, but was not able to stir: For as I happened to lie on my Back, I found my Arms and Legs were strongly fastened on each side to the Ground; and my Hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the same manner. I likewise felt several slender Ligatures across my body, from my Armpits to my Thighs. p.15 (Penguin, 2012)

This is nothing compared to the shock he experiences when he finds out who has bound him to the ground – a crowd of tiny humans no more than six inches tall…

As is the case with many true classics, Gulliver’s Travels is one of those books where it’s hard to tell whether I’ve actually read it or just lived it (I suspect that most of my memories of the stories come from their inclusion in the excellent Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were , a book I repeatedly consulted as a child). The reader follows the adaptable (and unfortunate) sailor on his travels, sharing his experiences over the four lengthy voyages. Alas, each time he gets home, Gulliver finds himself unable to resist the urge to head off again, soon leaving his kids and long-suffering wife behind.

But where exactly does he go? The precise locations of the places he visits are sketchy (owing to storms taking him off course and mutineers setting him adrift), but they are most certainly terra incognita . On the island of Lilliput, Gulliver finds himself towering above the tiny inhabitants while in the land of Brobdingnag the tables are turned, and the hapless traveller finds himself stranded in a realm of giants. The third journey sees him visiting the flying kingdom of Laputa, and the smaller islands it floats (and reigns) over, before the closing section takes us to the land of the Houyhnhnms, where humans are savage and horses rule.

Of course, as fun as it is to learn about these new lands, Gulliver’s Travels is primarily a satire in which Swift uses his creations to poke fun at contemporary society. One of the objects of his scorn is science (something the writer didn’t think much of), and on the visit to Laputa he skewers the obsession some have with finding new ways do things. Whether you agree with Gulliver or not, there’s no doubt that some of the crazy ideas he’s told, such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers or building houses from the roof down, really should have stayed on the drawing board.

However, the main focus of the writer’s critical eye is politics, which offended many contemporary critics. The rulers Gulliver meets over the course of his travels are just as fascinated by his world as he is with theirs, but after providing lengthy explanations of European affairs, courts, governments and conflicts, he’s humbled by how unimpressed his hosts are with the society he hails from:

As for yourself (continued the King) who have spent the greatest part of your Life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many Vices of your Country. But by what I have gathered from your own Relation, and the Answers I have with much Pains wringed and extorted from you, 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. (p.136)

Initially, Gulliver is offended by the criticism, but in the later journeys he ends up agreeing. By the time he visits the land of the Houyhnhnms and comes face to face with the Yahoos, the savage excrement-flinging humans, he’s ready to wish he was a horse instead.

Quite apart from the satire, another interesting feature of Gulliver’s Travels is the language used, as you may have noticed from the quotations above. In addition to the capitalisation of nouns and italicising proper names, there’s some rather unusual comma use and a number of archaic verb forms (‘durst’, ‘hath’). While it’s a little distracting at first, you soon get used to it, and the language is actually surprisingly similar to modern English. At several points I suspected that my version had been sanitised for modern consumption, but I haven’t been able to find a different version anywhere online (if anyone knows better, please speak up!).

Our hero’s adventures may seem slightly silly and fantastic now, but it’s important to remember that three centuries ago the world was still full of wonders. For example, Japan was a mysterious nation closed off to the rest of the world, and the great southern continent of Australia was still considered a myth by many. If we focus on the scientific aspect of the novel, it’s notable that the great Isaac Newton died around this time. Yes, he may have pondered gravity while nursing an apple-bruised head, but he was also an alchemist who spent half his life searching for the philosopher’s stone, so there was plenty of scope for the average reader to have doubts about the limits of the known world!

It won’t be for everyone, but Gulliver’s Travels is generally great fun, even if Swift goes over the top with the satire at times. However, you’re probably still wondering why I decided to reread it now. Well, writers often find it amusing to imagine continuations of other authors’ work ( I’ve been guilty of that myself ), and I’m evidently not the only one who wondered whether Gulliver might have followed up his four epic journeys with an even more spectacular fifth voyage…

…and on that note, I’ll leave you. Come back next time to see where we’re heading next 😉

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Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

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There are few great satirists who manage to judge their work so finely that it can be considered both a rip-roaring, fantastical adventure story suitable for children and adults alike, as well as a searing attack on the nature of society. In his Gulliver's Travels , Jonathon Swift has done precisely that and has bestowed upon us one of the great works of English literature in the process. A tale recognized far more widely than it is read, the story of Gulliver--a traveler who is, in turns, a giant, a tiny figure, a king and an idiot--is both excellent fun, as well as thoughtful, witty and wise.

The First Voyage

The travels that are referenced in Swift's title are four in number and always begin with an unfortunate incident that leaves Gulliver shipwrecked, abandoned, or otherwise lost at sea. On his first misadventure, he is washed up on the shores of Lilliput and awakes to find himself tied down by a hundred tiny threads. He soon realizes that he is a captive in a land of tiny people; compared to them, he is a giant.

The people soon put Gulliver to work--first of a manual kind, then in a war with neighboring people over the way that eggs should be properly cracked. The people turn against him when Gulliver puts out a fire in the palace by urinating on it.

Gulliver manages to return home, but he soon wishes to get out into the world again. This time, he finds himself in a land where he is tiny compared to the giants who live there. After numerous close encounters with the large animals that populate the land, and achieving some fame for his tiny size, he escapes Brobdingnag--a place he disliked because of the boorishness of its people--when a bird picks up the cage in which he resides and drops it into the sea.

On his third voyage, Gulliver pass through a number of lands, including one whose people literally have their head in the clouds. Their land floats above the normal Earth. These people are refined intellectuals who spend their time in esoteric and entirely pointless pursuits while others live below--as enslaved people.

Gulliver's final voyage takes him to a near utopia. He finds himself in a land of talking horses, called the Houyhnhnms, who rule over a world of brutish humans, called Yahoos. The society is beautiful--without violence, pettiness or greed. All the horses live together in a cohesive social unit. Gulliver feels that he is a stupid outsider. The Houyhnhnms cannot accept him because of his human form, and he escapes in a canoe. When he returns home, he is upset by the sordid nature of the human world and wishes he were back with the more enlightened horses that he left.

Beyond the Adventure

Brilliant and insightful, Gulliver's Travels , is not simply a fun adventure story. Rather, each of the worlds that Gulliver visits exhibits the features of the world in which Swift lived--often delivered in a caricatured , inflated form that is the stock in trade of a satirist.

Courtiers are given influence with a king dependent on how well they are at jumping through hoops: a sideswipe at politics. Thinkers have their head in the clouds while others suffer: a representation of intellectuals of Swift's time. And then, most tellingly, humanity's self-regard is punctured when we are portrayed as the beastly and incoherent Yahoos. Gulliver's brand of misanthropy is aimed at the lampooning and improvement of society through a form that is far removed from any kind of serious political or social tract.

Swift has a deft eye for an excellent image, and a uproarious, often bawdy sense of humor. In writing Gulliver's Travels , he has created a legend which endures up to our times and beyond.

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Book Review: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Book Title : Gulliver’s Travels

Author: Jonathan Swift

Format/Print Length/Language: Paperback/336 pages/English

Publisher: Penguin; Revised ed. edition (30 January 2003)

Book Blurb: Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver’s Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs.

In Laputa, a flying island, he encounters a society of speculators and projectors who have lost all grip on everyday reality; while they plan and calculate, their country lies in ruins.

Gulliver’s final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms, gentle horses whom he quickly comes to admire – in contrast to the Yahoos, filthy bestial creatures who bear a disturbing resemblance to humans. This text, based on the first edition of 1726, reproduces all the original illustrations and includes an introduction by Robert Demaria, Jr, which discusses the ways Gulliver’s Travels has been interpreted since its first publication.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.

Book Review: Gulliver’s Travels

I read this engaging novel again in my graduation days and one thing is for sure that every writer must read it and so should every reader. This beautiful piece of fiction is an adventure novel and Gulliver’s travel journey. In this book, Gulliver’s adventures are divided into four parts.

The first part is a Voyage to Lilliput where Gulliver finds himself in the land of miniature people which are less than 6 inches tall and where you could see him as a giant among the race of little people. The second part is a voyage to Brobdingnag where he turns too little for your interpretations and people over there are like giants to him. The third part is a voyage to Laputa which is a floating island and then the last part which is a Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms.

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So, Gulliver’s Travels ends on a thought-provoking note at the place where gulliver enters the country of Houyhnhnms comparing humans to the status of an animal.

This book makes you a lover of satire beautifully penned in an interesting travel story. With lots of imagery, imaginations, and reality at play, this novel will definitely inspire you to keep on turning pages. The narration is great, but the language is not quite that simple or easy to grasp. Overall, the story has so many in-depth meanings that ensure you to grab a copy of it.

Although as a fiction Gulliver’s Travels has done fairly well as other novels, as an adventure novel and the so-called satirical novel, the author has done complete justice to the plot, words and the characters. I would highly recommend this book to the travel lovers.

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Book Reviewer: NIKITA SINGH, a new age writer who works to build a parallel society for women and artists. She is an English literature graduate with PGDWE and a published author. Other than that, she is a content writer at a startup named ddkablog.

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A Summary and Analysis of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Gulliver’s Travels , first published in 1726 and written by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), has been called one of the first novels in English, one of the greatest satires in all of literature, and even a children’s classic (though any edition for younger readers is usually quite heavily abridged).

How should we respond to this wonderfully inventive novel? Is it even a ‘novel’ in the sense we’d usually understand that term? Before we launch into an analysis of Gulliver’s Travels and consider some of these questions, it’s perhaps worth recapping the plot (briefly).

Gulliver’s Travels : summary

Gulliver’s Travels is structurally divided into four parts, each of which recounts the adventures of the title character, a ship’s surgeon named Lemuel Gulliver, amongst some imaginary fantastical land.

In the first part, Gulliver is shipwrecked and knocked unconscious on the island of Lilliput, which is inhabited by tiny people. They take Gulliver prisoner, tying him to the ground, and he encounters the rival factions among the Lilliputians, such as the Big Endians and Little Endians, whose enmity started because they disagree over which side of a boiled egg to cut.

Then, he is enlisted into a campaign the Lilliputians are waging against a neighbouring island, Blefuscu. Gulliver drags the enemy fleet ashore so their invasion is foiled, and the Lilliputians honour and thank him – that is, until he refuses to be further drawn into the two countries’ war, at which moment they turn against him. It doesn’t help when he urinates on a fire to help put it out.

Gulliver takes refuge on Blefuscu, until a boat is washed ashore and he uses it to return to England, where he raises money for his family before embarking on a second voyage.

This time, in the second part of Gulliver’s Travels , our hero finds himself in Brobdingnag, a country which is inhabited by giants, rather than miniature people. When his ship runs aground, it is attacked by giants, and Gulliver is taken prisoner and given to the princess of Brobdingnag, a forty-feet-high girl named Glumdalclitch, as her plaything.

After arguing with the King over political matters – with Gulliver defending English attitudes and the King mocking them – Gulliver is picked up by a giant eagle and plopped into the sea, where he is rescued by a ship.

In the third part of the novel, Gulliver finds himself taken prisoner once again, this time by pirates, and taken to the floating island of Laputa. On a nearby island, Balnibarbi, he meets mad scientists and inventors who are engaged in absurd experiments: trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, or building a house from the roof down.

On a neighbouring island, Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver meets some magicians who can summon the dead; they summon numerous historical figures for him, including Julius Caesar, Homer, and Aristotle.

After this, on the island of Luggnagg, Gulliver meets the Struldbrugs: creatures who are immortal. However, this simply means they are foolish and weak than old men back in England, because they’ve had much longer to develop more folly and more illnesses.

Gulliver leaves Laputa behind, becoming a ship’s captain and continuing his voyages. Next, he encounters apelike creatures who, when he attacks one of their number, climb a tree and start discharging their excrement upon his head. (Excrement turns up a lot on Gulliver’s Travels , and Swift seems to have been obsessed by it.)

Gulliver is saved from a literal shower of sh … dung by the arrival of a horse, but this turns out to be a horse endowed with reason and language. Indeed, Gulliver soon learns that these horses rule this strange land: the horses, known as Houyhnhnms, are the masters, and the apelike creatures, known as Yahoos, are their semi-wild slaves. What’s more, Gulliver is horrified to learn that the Yahoos bear more than a passing resemblance to him, and to the human form!

What follows in this fourth part of the novel is a lengthy debate between Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms, who repeatedly show up the folly or evil of human behaviour as Gulliver describes it to them: war, money, and the legal system are all calmly but firmly taken apart by the intelligent horses.

However, Gulliver comes to prefer the company of the Houyhnhnms to the Yahoos, especially when he discovers, to his shock, that female Yahoos are attracted to him as one of their own kind. Gulliver resolves to stay with his new equine friends and shun humanity forever. He admires, above all else, the Houyhnhnms’ devotion to reason over baser instincts or desires.

But he is not allowed to stay with them for long. Fearing that he may inspire the Yahoos to rise up against their horsy overlords, they tell him to leave, and Gulliver regretfully builds a boat, is picked up by a Portuguese ship, and makes his way back to England. However, he struggles to readjust to human society, after he has spent time among the Houyhnhnms, and he prefers to pass his time in the company of the horses in his stable.

Gulliver’s Travels : analysis

We often celebrate great works of literature for their generosity of spirit: we talk of Shakespeare’s ‘humanity’, of Wordsworth’s empathy, George Eliot’s humanistic ability to feel for another person. But Swift is in quite a different tradition. He was disgusted by us all with our filthy bodies and rotten, wrong-headed attitudes.

Yet he wrote a great work of literature in Gulliver’s Travels , which tells us much about who we really are, especially through his depiction of the Yahoos, and who we could be, through Gulliver’s conversations with the Houyhnhnms.

Perhaps the key aspect of the novel here is its satire: it means that we can never be sure when Swift is being serious and when he is pulling our leg, when he is inviting us to share Gulliver’s views and when he wishes us to long to clout the silly fool round the head. That, too, is one of the signs of a timeless novel: its multifaceted quality. Gulliver’s Travels has more facets than you can shake a mucky stick at.

The same difficulty of interpretation – or divining authorial intention and meaning – often attends great works of satire. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which was probably an influence on Swift and Gulliver’s Travels , is similarly difficult to analyse in terms of its author’s own views. Critics can’t quite agree whether More is pulling the reader’s leg in Utopia or sincerely offering a vision of a perfect world.

There are, however, some clues that much of the book, if not the whole thing, is supposed to be satirical: it’s hard to see the staunchly Roman Catholic More seriously advocating divorce by mutual consent, something that is encouraged in the book, nor is it likely that he was in favour of women priests, very much a feature of More’s looking-glass island republic.

So the same issue probably attends Gulliver’s Travels . Is Gulliver right to view the Houyhnhnms as the pinnacle of rational humanism – something that actual humans should aspire to emulate? Or should we be shocked by the Houyhnhnms’ proposal that the Yahoos should be forcibly sterilised, even exterminated, as a decisively in human attitude towards their fellow living creatures?

Swift’s disgust with his fellow humans was real, especially in the last few decades of his life when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels , but this does not mean he was not acutely aware of the dangers attendant on such misanthropy. It’s one thing to have a dim view of the human race as falling short of what they could achieve; it’s quite another to suggest that, because they succumb to wars and other dangerous follies, they deserve to be wiped from the face of the earth.

It’d be like a satirist writing in the present century suggesting that, because humans have been the main drivers behind climate change, the best thing would be for all human life to be annihilated from the planet. It’d be a solution to the problem (or part of it), but it wouldn’t be a very morally humane one.

And is Swift’s book, for all that, a novel as such? Like Robinson Crusoe , Defoe’s pioneering work published seven years earlier, Gulliver’s Travels presented itself to the reader as a genuine account, recounting four voyages made by Lemuel Gulliver.

Readers embarking on their journey of reading the book in 1726 may well have been forgiven for thinking it a travel book, like the bestselling books by explorers of the day such as William Dampier (who was one of the first to travel to Australia, around whose coast Swift locates the islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu). But then the book takes a fantastical turn and we gradually realise we are in a work of the imagination.

So it’s perhaps best to answer the question ‘is Gulliver’s Travels a novel?’ with a cautious ‘yes … but only if we bear in mind it was written before the word “novel” had even first been applied to works like Gulliver’s Travels .’

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels”

I heard that the severe-faced Swift claimed to have laughed only twice in his life – once when Tom was swallowed by a cow on stage in Henry Fielding’s “Tom Thumb the Great” (the little man with a great soul – or mirror image of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, aka “The Great Man” – presumably “with a diminutive soul” in Fielding’s satire). I can’t remember the other time Swift laughed. But he can sure get others to do so!

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All of us would have seen, read, or heard Gulliver’s Travels and the terms coined from the novel like Lilliput. Mostly, we would’ve read it during our childhood. The novel has been shortened, simplified, and used as short stories in school curriculums worldwide. It has been adapted for screenplay and made into numerous cartoons, animation and live-action films, theatrical plays, etc.

Gulliver’s Travels (Review)

Gullivers Travels By Jonathan Swift Review Rating Book Novel Summary

I was studying fifth grade, and just after school, I remember lending the book Gulliver’s Travels from a dainty library near my home. The book was very old, sporadically torn, had yellowish pages. But since I started reading about the voyage of Lemuel Gulliver and his arrival at Lilliput, I was enthralled by the plotline. So although the book didn’t have any illustrations or colours in it, I painted every last detail of the book with my own imagination.

Even back then, I noticed the absurdities in the story, especially the characters. But I did not realize the satirical commentary on politics and human society. To me, it just felt like an adventure novel. Perhaps that is the genius of the writer Jonathan Swift. He was an Irish author who had a unique style of writing. His dry humour and satirical sense were unmatched compared to his contemporaries. And at the same time, his usage of antiquated and fictional wordings might prove to be strenuous for readers.

Gulliver's Travels

All of us would have seen, read, or heard Gulliver's Travels and the terms coined from the novel like Lilliput. Mostly, we would've read it during our childhood. The novel has been shortened, simplified, and used as short stories in school curriculums worldwide. It has been adapted for screenplay and made into numerous cartoons, animation and live-action films, theatrical plays, etc.

URL: https://bookwritten.com/gullivers-travels-by-jonathan-swift-review/4730/

Author: Jonathan Swift

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Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Travels into several remote nations of the world.

The 55th greatest book of all time

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Gulliver’s Travels

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Table Of Contents

Gulliver’s Travels , four-part satirical work by Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift , published anonymously in 1726 as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World . A keystone of English literature , it is one of the books that contributed to the emergence of the novel as a literary form in English. A parody of the then popular travel narrative, Gulliver’s Travels combines adventure with savage satire , mocking English customs and the politics of the day.

Gulliver’s Travels is a first-person narrative that is told from the point of view of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain who visits remote regions of the world, and it describes four adventures. In the first one, Gulliver is the only survivor of a shipwreck, and he swims to Lilliput, where he is tied up by people who are less than 6 inches (15 cm) tall. He is then taken to the capital city and eventually released. The Lilliputians’ small size mirrors their small-mindedness. They indulge in ridiculous customs and petty debates. Political affiliations, for example, are divided between men who wear high-heeled shoes (symbolic of the English Tories ) and those who wear low ones (representing the English Whigs ), and court positions are filled by those who are best at rope dancing. Gulliver is asked to help defend Lilliput against the empire of Blefuscu, with which Lilliput is at war over which end of an egg should be broken, this being a matter of religious doctrine. Gulliver captures Blefuscu’s naval fleet, thus preventing an invasion, but declines to assist the emperor of Lilliput in conquering Blefuscu. Later Gulliver extinguishes a fire in the royal palace by urinating on it. Eventually he falls out of favour and is sentenced to be blinded and starved. He flees to Blefuscu, where he finds a normal-size boat and is thus able to return to England.

Gulliver’s second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, inhabited by a race of giants. A farm worker finds Gulliver and delivers him to the farm owner. The farmer begins exhibiting Gulliver for money, and the farmer’s young daughter, Glumdalclitch, takes care of him. One day the queen orders the farmer to bring Gulliver to her, and she purchases Gulliver. He becomes a favourite at court, though the king reacts with contempt when Gulliver recounts the splendid achievements of his own civilization. The king responds to Gulliver’s description of the government and history of England by concluding that the English must be a race of “odious vermin.” Gulliver offers to make gunpowder and cannon for the king, but the king is horrified by the thought of such weaponry. Eventually Gulliver is picked up by an eagle and then rescued at sea by people of his own size.

On Gulliver’s third voyage he is set adrift by pirates and eventually ends up on the flying island of Laputa. The people of Laputa all have one eye pointing inward and the other upward, and they are so lost in thought that they must be reminded to pay attention to the world around them. Though they are greatly concerned with mathematics and with music, they have no practical applications for their learning. Laputa is the home of the king of Balnibarbri, the continent below it. Gulliver is permitted to leave the island and visit Lagado, the capital city of Balnibarbri. He finds the farm fields in ruin and the people living in apparent squalor. Gulliver’s host explains that the inhabitants follow the prescriptions of a learned academy in the city, where the scientists undertake such wholly impractical projects as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Later Gulliver visits Glubbdubdrib, the island of sorcerers, and there he speaks with great men of the past and learns from them the lies of history. In the kingdom of Luggnagg he meets the struldbrugs, who are immortal but age as though they were mortal and are thus miserable. From Luggnagg he is able to sail to Japan and thence back to England.

In the fourth part, Gulliver visits the land of the Houyhnhnms , a race of intelligent horses who are cleaner and more rational, communal, and benevolent (they have, most tellingly, no words for deception or evil) than the brutish, filthy, greedy, and degenerate humanoid race called Yahoos, some of whom they have tamed—an ironic twist on the human-beast relationship. The Houyhnhnms are very curious about Gulliver, who seems to be both a Yahoo and civilized, but, after Gulliver describes his country and its history to the master Houyhnhnm , the Houyhnhnm concludes that the people of England are not more reasonable than the Yahoos. At last it is decided that Gulliver must leave the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver then returns to England, so disgusted with humanity that he avoids his family and buys horses and converses with them instead.

Gulliver’s Travels. By Jonathan Swift.

LITERATURE MATTERS

In 1726 essayist and poet Jonathan Swift published his magnum opus , now regarded as an indisputable classic of English literature. Gulliver’s Travels is both a satire on human nature and a parody of popular travel narratives of the day. Swift’s satirical fury — William Makepeace Thackeray called it “furious, raging, obscene” — is directed against almost every aspect of early-18th-century British life. The tale recounts the expedition of Lemuel Gulliver, a practical-minded former surgeon turned captain of the high seas, who sets sail in his aptly named ship, The Adventure , to visit “several remote nations of the world.”

The most well-known scene of Swift’s satirical tour de force is Gulliver’s shipwreck on Lilliput, an island inhabited by a race of six-inch-tall people who enjoy arguing over trivial matters, such as whether boiled eggs ought to be cracked open at the big end or little end, a clever parody of contemporary British political and religious disputes. It is here on the shores of Lilliput where the brave traveler awakes to finds himself a god-like giant bound by a thousand tiny threads. His Lilliputian captors regard him with awe — and later use him as their personal Goliath to subdue the neighboring Blefuscudians. Swift’s satire is on full display when Gulliver is charged with treason for publicly urinating in the capital, even though he was doing so in order to douse a raging fire.

Later, in the kingdom of Brobdingnag, Gulliver (like Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century Alice) finds the tables have turned: Here, he is a tiny man in a country of giants who treat him as a zoological curiosity and exhibit him for money.

Through Gulliver’s subsequent experiences with the philosopher-citizens on the flying island of Laputa, Swift spoofs the speculations of scientism. The Laputans are so obsessed with theoretical science — they contemplate ways to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, for example — that they have to be reminded to listen to and speak with one another. Then there’s the land of the virtuous horse-like Houyhnhnms, whom Swift contrasts with the Yahoos, vicious brutes who bear a disturbing resemblance to humans.

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Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (review)

Ashley Marshall
Volume 47, Number 1, Autumn 2014
10.1353/scb.2014.0052
View Citation

Additional Information

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

This is the third volume to appear in print of the 18-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. The first two—Goldgar and Gadd’s English Political Writings 1711–1714 and Walsh’s A Tale of a Tub and Other Works —represent major advances, both solid, meticulous volumes that supply sober, judicious, readable, helpful editorial apparatus. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the new Gulliver’s Travels .

Mr. Womersley’s edition of the Travels has strengths. Trial collation suggests that this is a carefully done, highly accurate text. As compared with the entirely unannotated Davis edition, the present volume is rich, learned, often illuminating. It is substantial, running to almost a thousand pages: the front matter occupies more than a hundred pages; Swift’s actual text covers 444 pages, many of which are swamped by Mr. Womersley’s profuse, detailed, often vast footnotes; another 120 pages are devoted to “Long Notes” at the end; there are four appendices (frontispiece portraits; commendatory poems probably written by Pope; correspondence pertinent to the Travels; and a facsimile of the 1726 title page); and roughly 150 pages of textual introduction and collations.

For all of its erudition, this remains a frustrating edition of a major English classic. The lengthy introduction, subdivided into nine sections, abounds with information and observations but is curiously erratic in its coverage. Scholarship on the Travels is plenteous and fraught, and one would expect from an edition such as this a digestible and perhaps extensive précis of its critical history—or at least some engagement with the principal contextual issues that bear on its interpretation. Mr. Womersley takes up the debate over Part IV—his sympathies are (like mine) with the hard school—but several concerns foregrounded by other recent editors and critics of the Travels are marginalized or ignored. Irish contexts are only minimally relevant to the edition, nor does Mr. Womersley have anything to say (for example) about the relationship of Swift’s satire, generically and modally, to contemporaneous prose fiction, including the emergent novel. The introduction is long and learned, but Mr. Womersley’s concerns are narrow. The idée fixe of the volume is signaled by the presence of two introductory sections devoted to vexation, which the editor describes as “the mode of Gulliver’s Travels .” Such an emphasis will not surprise Swiftians, all too familiar with the (varyingly compelling) versions of “reader entrapment” propounded to explain the Dean’s strategies, though Mr. Womersley is disinclined to acknowledge that substantial subset of Gulliver criticism (see Rodino, Rawson) and in the main seems to consider his a novel approach.

The introduction is not easily navigable. For example: Mr. Womersley raises an excellent question about what we are to make of the inconsistency of Swift’s political principles—and then turns abruptly to “the origin of sexual desire which Plato puts into the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium .” What this has to do with the contention that “for Swift there is some strange homology between the origin of party, the condition of party politics, and the terminus of party” is never cogently communicated. Some of Mr. Womersley’s synthesis in the introduction is effective and astute, but I suspect most readers [End Page 40] will find themselves feeling that there is more language than substance here. Mr. Womersley is fond of playful formulations (“at the outset of [Swift’s] literary career he had pitched his mansion in the very seat of textual excrement”) that can smack of the overly clever. Composing the Travels , we are told, “imprisoned [Swift] ethically but released him technically.” This is a characteristically dazzling statement, but it does not seem particularly true. The author of A Tale of a Tub —published twenty-two years before the Travels —hardly needed to throw off technical restraint, and that the disaffected but spirited and well-socialized Dean of St. Patrick’s felt “ethically imprisoned” after the mid-twenties is provocative, but improbable. Likewise suggestive but similarly unsubstantiated is the claim that the politics of...

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Gulliver's Travels: Introduction

Gulliver's travels: plot summary, gulliver's travels: detailed summary & analysis, gulliver's travels: themes, gulliver's travels: quotes, gulliver's travels: characters, gulliver's travels: symbols, gulliver's travels: literary devices, gulliver's travels: quizzes, gulliver's travels: theme wheel, brief biography of jonathan swift.

Historical Context of Gulliver's Travels

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Full Title: Gulliver’s Travels , or, Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships
When Written: 1720-1725
Where Written: Dublin, Ireland
When Published: 1726
Literary Period: Augustan
Genre: Satire
Setting: England and the imaginary nations of Lilliput, Blefuscu, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms
Climax: Gulliver’s decision to reject humankind and try his best to become a Houyhnhnm
Point of View: First person

Extra Credit for Gulliver's Travels

By Gulliver, About Gulliver. Although contemporary editions of Gulliver’s Travels have Jonathan Swift’s name printed as author on the cover, Swift published the first edition under the pseudonym Lemuel Gulliver.

Instant Classic. Gulliver’s Travels was an immediate success upon its first publication in 1726. Since then, it has never been out of print.

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Book Review: Gulliver’s Travels

The full original title in 1726 was Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. I’m thankful it was eventually shortened. 🙂 It was written by Jonathan Swift, an Irish Anglican clergyman, politician, and writer best known for his scathing satire.

I knew about Gulliver’s waking up on an island and finding himself tied down by 6-inch people called the Lilliputians, but I hadn’t known of his other travels. The book opens with a very short account of his background, and then launches into his first voyage as a ship’s surgeon. The book is divided into four parts:

Part 1: Lilliput . Gulliver’s boat is shipwrecked and he appears to be the lone survivor. He washes up on an island and wakes up realizing that he can’t move. Swift’s writing is nice here in that he gradually makes us aware through Gulliver’s eyes of what has happened, with the realization that his every limb and even his hair is tied down, to noticing a little person making his way up his body to speak to him. Gulliver and the Lilliputians can’t understand each other, but they are able to make signs to one another, and they eventually take him to their king. Gulliver has a facility for languages, thankfully, and soon can communicate easily. Once he assures the king that he will be loyal to him and careful of his subjects, he’s given free reign to go about the land. In a war with the Lilliputian’s enemies in Blefuscu, Gulliver saves the day by single-handedly capturing their fleet. The Lilliputian king wants Gulliver to help him subdue all his enemies, but Gulliver will not be persuaded to enslave a free people. The king says he understands, but things are not quite the same between them afterward. Then when the queen’s house catches fire, and people are passing along these pitiful thimble-sized buckets of water to Gulliver to pour on the flames, he realizes he has a better way: he needs to urinate and voluminously does so on the queen’s house, putting out the fire, but seriously offending her. A friend at court alerts Gulliver that plans are being made to put out his eyes and starve him, so he escapes to Blefescu and eventually find an abandoned boat in his size and returns home.

Part 2: Brobdingnag . After a short while at home, Gulliver sets out on another voyage, wherein storms blow his ship off course, and they stop at an island to search for fresh water. Suddenly Gulliver notices that his boat is quickly making out for sea without him, and then notices there is a giant twelve times the size of an ordinary human wading out into the sea after the ship. Gulliver runs the other way and finds himself in a field, where one of the workers notices him and at first thinks he is a bug or animal. He is taken to a farmer and goes through the same method of first signing, then pointing to objects and asking their names, to eventually being able to communicate quite well. The farmer decides to charge to “show” Gulliver several times a day to people for a fee, exhausting him. Eventually he is given an audience with the queen, who buys him from the farmer. The queen treats him well but views him almost as a doll. He encounters problems with flies, rats, and even a monkey. When Gulliver complains of anything, he’s not taken seriously. The king discusses the politics and history of England with Gulliver but belittles them, saying, “I cannot but conclude that 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.” A search is made for a woman of Gulliver’s size for him to mate with, but he is thankful that none is found, for he would not want to produce a family just to be shown like circus animals. There seems to be no escape for him. But one day a servant takes him in a little box that the queen had made for him to the seashore, where a bird snatches up the box by the clasp on top. When the bird is attacked by other birds, it drops the box into the sea, where it floats until it is found by a ship of men Gulliver’s own size, and he is returned home.

Part 3: Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg,and Glubbdubdrib . Gulliver’s wife does not want him to sail again, but his love of travel and desire to see the world sets him out once more. This time pirates attack his ship, and he maroons an another island. He notices something in the sky and realizes it is a floating island. He gets the attention of the people on it, and they lower a chair to bring him up. The people are his own size, but their “heads were all reclined, either to the right, or the left; one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up.” They were all so absorbed in their own thoughts that they had to hire “flappers” to bop their ears when they needed to listen and their chins when they needed to answer. It took Gulliver a while to convince them he didn’t need that aid. The island was called Laputa, and the king lived there, ruling over the land of Balnibarbi below. The island moves by a magnetic lodestone, and one of the ways the king exerts pressure on his subjects is by centering the floating island above an area so that it receives neither sun nor rain until the people acquiesce. When Gulliver asks to visit the land below, he finds academies and labs full of ludicrous experiments, such as “an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food,” “a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downward to the foundation,” using spider webs instead of silkworms, a method of language reduced to nouns and using objects instead of words. Yet in practical matters, their clothes weren’t measured to fit, their buildings were were not built well, their fields were barren (and one man who worked his fields in the ‘ancient’ manner and had them lush and green was looked down upon.) He eventually finds a voyage back home.

Part 4: The Country of the Houyhnhnms . Gulliver sets sail once again, this time as the captain of a vessel. Several of his men die en route, so he hires men from islands he comes across on the way. But the new hires had been buccaneers and soon persuaded his men to mutiny against him and leave him on the first bit of land they came to. As Gulliver tries to find people on the island to trade with for supplies, he discovers some hideous creatures with long hair on their heads and chest and claw-like nails. They block his path, and he swings his sword to try to fend them off without cutting them. He races to a tree, but they climb up it and defecate on him. Suddenly they all run away, and Gulliver sees a horse on the path, looking at him with wonder. Another horse comes along, and they seem to be conversing. Soon he discovers that horses called Houyhnhnms are the ruling animals here. He is startled and horrified to discover that the creatures he first encountered, called Yahoos, are actually human. The Houyhnhnms think he is Yahoo as well, but agree that he has more reason than the others do. One takes him into his home. Gulliver admires the virtues and reasonableness of the Houyhnhnms so well that he is ashamed to be a lowly Yahoo. The Houyhnhnms are something like Vulcans: big on reason but short on emotion. When Gulliver is grieved at being expelled from the area because it’s not seemly for a Houyhnhnm to have a Yahoo in his home, and finds passage back to England, he can’t stand the sight and smell of other humans, associating them with Yahoos, even though they show great kindness, like the captain who finds and provides for him. He is repulsed by his wife and children, but buys a couple of horses and converses with them several hours a day.

Many points in this book would have been so recognized at the time that it was published anonymously and Swift’s publisher edited out some of the most offensive sections. In a later edition, Swift added a fictional letter as if from Gulliver to his cousin fussing about the alterations, saying. “I do hardly know mine own work.” Wikipedia , SparkNotes , Shmoop , and CliffsNotes all had good information about what the satire referred to, though they disagreed in a couple of particulars. Cliifsnotes was the most extensive, and their Philosophical and Political Background and Essay on Swift’s Satire and Gulliver as a Dramatis Persona were quite enlightening. Shmoop’s character list and analysis gave a fairly succinct explanation of who or what the different characters represented.

But Swift satirizes several things in this book that one can easily pick up on without knowing the references. Travel books, for one: he mentions several times that he is telling the “truth,” not like so many other travelogues that exaggerate and make up stories. He pokes fun at the fact that every government thinks it is the best form, at academia that is so wrapped up in the theoretical that it is impractical, at the bluster and self-importance of people like the Lilliputians, who could have been easily crushed if Gulliver had had a mind to, the arrogant exaltation of reason that lacks empathy and emotion, the tendency of “big government” to be so far removed from the needs of the “little people.” The silly rope dances that people who wanted to advance in the kingdom had to do easily makes fun of the hoops similar officials have to jump through that have little to do with skill. The conflicts between the Big Endians and Little Endians over the right way to break an egg and those who prefer high heels or low heels satirizes how ridiculous some conflicts between factions can be (as well as an heir to the crown who hobbles because he wears one big heel and one low heel to please both sides). And, finally, he satirizes man’s faults and foibles in general.

I can understand why the book has been censored, aside from the political views of its day. There’s quite a lot about bodily functions in addition to Gulliver’s urinating on the queen’s quarters to put out a fire. There are also some parts that would be considered risqué.

Excepting one particular section, I enjoyed the book and am glad to know some of these cultural references. I hadn’t realized that the term yahoo as “an uncultivated or boorish person” originated here.

I enjoyed the audiobook narrated by David Hyde Pierce, who did an excellent job. I especially liked how he pronounced Houyhnhnm and some of the Houyhnhnm words with a little whinny in his voice. I also reread some sections more closely in the Gutenberg version online .

(Sharing at Semicolon ‘s Saturday Review of Books)

Reflection on Gulliver’s Travels Part One Essay (Book Review)

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The author of A Voyage to Lilliput , which forms the first part of Gulliver’s Travels, introduces the reader to a brief historical account of his own life encounters coupled with his own family. According to The Literature Network, one can tell his travel from the evident shipwrecks and abductions coupled with instances of making long swims in an attempt to make his life safe and sound (Para. 1).

After swimming for long distances, he arrived to the shores of Lilliput. However, thinking that he was safe, his life turns otherwise and finds himself held as a captive in the upcountry. To make the narrations of this travel vivid and real, the author applies the stylistic devices such as satire, and symbols to build on his themes.

Satire is a stylistic a device where authors of literary works ridicule or rather make fun out of human weaknesses or vices. The main purpose of using satire lies predominately on the intents to correcting these vices through humor.

In part one of A Voyage to Lilliput the author incredibly satirizes the English people: something that makes them look like dwarfish especially in their capacity to cope with mega issues, thoughts and or deeds. In fact, he could not manage his business and his journey. He says, “I grew weary of the sea” (Swift Chapter 1).

This way, part one of A Voyage to Lilliput emerges as one of the enormous attacks made on humankind targeting people’s stupidity and or wickedness. As a way of example, Swift ridicules the wrangles existing between the Protestants and Roman Catholics, which resulted to war in the 18th century. Arguably, the egg controversy is a satirical strategy that enables the author to reflect and correct the eminent cultural and moral conflicts surrounding the interpretation of the holy book: The Bible.

Literary works deploy symbols to represent abstract ideas. These symbols could take the form of colors, objects, figures or even characters. Swift’s work does not fail also to make use of these symbols in an attempt to develop A Voyage to Lilliput themes.

Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, laputans, houyhnhnms and England are some of the symbols used in A Voyage to Lilliput (Donaldson 2339). Lilliputians, as implied in the title of the chapter, depict people extensively characterized by pride. Lilliputians, not only show themselves off to the non-natives as Gulliver, but also amongst themselves.

On the other hand, Brobdingnagians is typically symbolic of personal, private and physiques of people when keenly scrutinized. Laputans symbolize the theoretical knowledge, which perhaps gives no value to humankind. While Houyhnhnms symbolize ideal and rational existence, which is depictive of life dictated by concepts of moderation and sense, England, on the other hand, is a symbol of a land of sufficiency or insufficiency.

The chief object of employing the symbols and satire is to help authors to develop successfully and in a detailed way the themes of their work. Themes encompass the universal or rather the fundamental idea introspected by a literary work. In part one of A Voyage to Lilliput, right as compared to a mighty society, as opposed to individual perceptions, and limitations of the capacity to understand among human beings, are amongst the key themes developed by Swift (Chapter 1).

Gulliver, for instance, stands out as a physically might person. By virtue of this physical mightiness, Gulliver acquires an advantage in the defeat of Blefuscudian (Donaldson 2360). Arguably, this presents a dilemma on what should regulate the actions of the society. Should mightiness or forces of moral righteousness characterize it?

Conclusively, through various characterizations, which largely serve as symbols and satire, Swift is able to build on the themes of part one of A Voyage to Lilliput. Satire presents humorous moments in the novel, though in the end, the author successfully manages to correct certain moral vices.

Works Cited

Donaldson, Talbot. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume 1 Gullivers Travels Part One: A Voyage To Lilliput . New York: Norton &company, 1980. Print.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travel: A Voyage to Lilliput. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1727. Print.

The Literature Network. Part I. A Voyage to Lilliput , 2010. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2018, October 25). Reflection on Gulliver’s Travels Part One. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reflection-on-gullivers-travels-part-one/

"Reflection on Gulliver’s Travels Part One." IvyPanda , 25 Oct. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/reflection-on-gullivers-travels-part-one/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Reflection on Gulliver’s Travels Part One'. 25 October.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Reflection on Gulliver’s Travels Part One." October 25, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reflection-on-gullivers-travels-part-one/.

1. IvyPanda . "Reflection on Gulliver’s Travels Part One." October 25, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reflection-on-gullivers-travels-part-one/.

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Gulliver’s travels book by jonathan swift: book review.

Do not buy Gulliver’s Travels Book if everyone is telling you that it is very famous. Why? It’s because people buy books just because famous writers are thought to be the best.

But what if I told you that this story is more than just voyage adventures? Will you buy it now? If you are a person like me who wants to know about human psychology and how society works, this novel is for you.

Everyone says that Gulliver’s Travels book is for children, but I can say without a doubt that it is for anyone who is imaginative enough to understand life lessons in children’s books.

At first, it might not seem like it, but I promise that after finding meaning in each part, you will understand what I’m saying.

I am going to show you how a book published in 1726 can still make sense and teach us about our society and how to improve it.

Table of Contents

About the Author: Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was a writer in satire, essays, political pamphleteer, poet and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral.

He was known for writing autobiographies of his fictional characters. Swift was born on 30 th November 1667 in Ireland. He wrote many of his works when he was in Country Meath in the 1700s.

The author received his degree of Doctor of Divinity from Trinity College, Dublin in 1702. He used to travel often to England and published his first books, ‘A Tale of a Tub’ and ‘The Battle of The Books’ in 1704.

During his career as a political pamphleteer and priest, he continued writing novels and poems.

Swift has written over 60 essays, tracts, pamphlets, periodicals, poems, novels, and prayers. John Ruskin named him as one of the three people who influenced him the most.

The author also wrote his epitaph. On 19 th October 1745, Jonathan Swift died due to a severe stroke at the age of 77.

Gulliver’s Travels Book Review

Lemuel Gulliver was the third son of a small estate owner in Nottinghamshire. After completing 14 years of age, Gulliver was sent to Cambridge studies for three years. He spent the next four years assisting Dr James Bates, a well-known surgeon in London. Gulliver studied medicine and went on voyages to fulfil his dream of seeing the world. After coming back to London, he got married to a very pretty girl with a handsome dowry and planned to settle down in London. But his practice couldn’t earn him expected money, so he took up a job as a ship’s surgeon. After some prosperous time in the voyage, their ship got wrecked. Gulliver swam to the nearest shore he could find and fell into a deep sleep.

Lilliput – The Land of Manikin

When Gulliver woke up the next morning, he noticed that he was tightly roped down to the ground.

A little creature climbed his abdomen and started shouting something in a gibberish language. They fed him, gave him wine to drink, and took away his weapons.

After staying with them for some time, Gulliver began to understand their language. He came to know that Lilliputians call him as Mountain Man.

They observe him and study his habits. But they always keep him tied by the ankle to their church’s pillar.

After a short adventure in Lilliput, the little people allow Gulliver to build a boat and return to his home.

One aspect of human society is portrayed in this part of the novel. We judge things and beings by size and automatically assume that large things are harmful to us.

Gulliver being tied by chains seems familiar, doesn’t it? There’s the concept of keeping animals hostage for studying and display.

Brobdingnag – The Land of Giants

After spending two months in London, Gulliver started getting bored of his comfortable life. So, he boarded another ship and started for another voyage.

For some time at first, they were having a very good and profitable journey. But then, the sea friendly sea turned into a sudden tempest.

With great difficulty, the men turned the ship aimlessly for some long days and find land.

They wandered about and Gulliver went a little farther from his companions. When he glanced back, he saw everyone had already boarded the ship and had left.

He ran behind them but he saw a giant monster going after them as fast as possible. The giant creature seemed like a sixty-foot tall human.

He found Gulliver, picked him up and took him to his home. His daughter made Gulliver little dresses and after some days, they took him to the market for display.

After spending two exhausting years in Brobdingnag, Gulliver’s masters went for a journey on the sea and took Gulliver with them.

Suddenly, a giant eagle caught the handle of Gulliver’s house and took him off.

After some time, the eagle was attacked by other eagles and dropped Gulliver off in the sea where an English ship found him and took him back to London.

This part represents the animals in the circus. They are taken away from their family and forced to perform for long hours without rest.

They are used for money and treated harshly if they show any signs of exhaustion.

Laputa – The Flying Island

Hardly ten days after Gulliver’s return home, a ship’s captain offered Gulliver to be his surgeon on the ship. Gulliver accepted his offer only because of their friendship, and soon they set off.

On the third day of their sail, they get caught in a storm. After surviving ten days in the storm, a group of pirates attacked them.

They took Gulliver’s baggage, put him on a little boat and sailed away. A couple of days passed and Gulliver’s boat reached an island.

After some days on that island, Gulliver noticed a body floating two miles in the air. It was moving and had humans on it.

The humans sent down a chain and Gulliver sat into its seat and pulled up in the air. When he came up, he noticed that the body was a floating island and a large number of people were living on it.

But the inhabitants spoke a different language so no communication was possible. Gulliver noticed that the people on the island looked strange.

Their heads were tilted to the right or left, one of their irises was near the nose and the other was up.

After spending a few days with them, Gulliver began to catch a few words like the name of their island, Laputa, which roughly translated to ‘Flying Island’.

The main interests of these people were music and math. Laputa was a grand city with domes and spacious yards.

Balnibarbi – A Land of Ruins

Gulliver got bored on Laputa and soon asked the king to let him go and he set off for Balnibarbi. Balnibarbi was a land of complete ruins.

Some people of Balnibarbi went to Laputa and returned with new ideas of development, which never worked. The academy in Balnibarbi had people doing weird experiments.

Gulliver was troubled by the people in the academy and decided to set off for home.

Glubbdubdrib – A Land of Magicians

He took a short tour to Glubbdubdrib, a land of magicians. Governor allowed Gulliver to summon a spirit and Gulliver spoke to many great personalities.

Luggnagg – The Land of Immortals

After leaving Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver went to Luggnagg where he didn’t like any of the idiotic traditions.

In the kingdom of Luggnagg, he met immortals with a mark over their left eyebrow.

But the immortals, after a certain point, became only breathing corpses, unable to talk, hear, see or move. Soon, he left Luggnagg and arrived in London.

Houyhnhnms – The Land of Yahoos

Gulliver stayed home for five months but then set out as a captain of a ship. Many of his sailors died due to sickness, so he had to recruit new ones.

His old sailors became pirates and revolted. Gulliver had to stay in his cabin for a long time until his ship reached an unknown island.

He came out and saw weird beasts with claws and beards like goats. The beasts chased him and two horses scared it off for him.

As Gulliver was running off, one of the horses called him and he learnt that these were magicians who had turned themselves into horses.

But again, Gulliver faced the difficulty of an unknown language. The horses took him to their house where more horses were living which suddenly started shouting, “ Yahoo! Yahoo! ”.

Gulliver was taken to the weird beasts which strangely appeared human. The horses offered Gulliver flesh and hay which Gulliver refused because he could not eat the rotten hay and flesh.

Instead, he pointed towards a cow and the horses gave him milk to drink. After 3 months, Gulliver succeeded in learning their language.

He came to know that the weird beasts that looked human were called Yahoos and the horses were called Houyhnhnms.

The Houyhnhnms were surprised that a creature that seemed like Yahoos was of intelligence superior to them.

Difference Between Houyhnhnms and Europe

Gulliver tells his master that the horses in his hometown are used for racing, traveling and drawing carriages.

The Houyhnhnms are surprised to know the roles are totally exchanged in Gulliver’s country. Gulliver tells them all about Europe while answering their questions.

The Houyhnhnms conclude that the English yahoos are worse because of so many reasons. Gulliver liked his time with the horses so much that he was hesitant to return to his home.

But he had to leave. After returning home, he thought of his family as Yahoos and couldn’t bear to look at them for a year.

He bought two horses and talked to them daily for four hours. This part makes us understand that once we spend time with other animals, humans start seeming ill-mannered to us.

What I Admire in Gulliver’s Travels book

The Gulliver’s travels book was published in 1726 and I love how it still makes so much sense about human society and mentality.

The way we treat animals and outsiders are undeniably bad. It shows us that if someone treats us the way we treat others, we will understand the problems they face.

Another thing we come to know in Gulliver’s Travels book is that the earth is so vast that many undiscovered places are completely cut off from the outside world.

I love everything about this book and each message it gives. I had this book in my curriculum in ninth grade and I’m very glad about that.

What I Disliked in Gulliver’s Travels Book

There is only one thing about this story that I dislike, that is, after a certain point, it can get boring to read it.

In the middle of significant changes, there are so many details, so the story gets very lengthy and uninteresting to read until the next important part.

Note that there is nothing wrong with the details, but it works better if they were carefully distributed over each part to retain the interest of the reader.

To Wrap Up This Review of Gulliver’s Travels book

‘Gulliver’s Travels book’ by Jonathan Swift is one of the best-selling novels in the history of literature.

It is a perfect blend of satire and lessons. It tells us about the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver and about the different lands and creatures he discovered there.

The story gives us lessons to be kind to all creatures and gets to know their habits better and that there are a lot of places to be discovered.

But, we need to save these animals and places too because we can find beauty in everything and everyone if look close enough.

So, purchase or gift the Gulliver’s Travels Book and make your day a better day.

If you love reading such books, you can explore more in Children Books page under Fiction Books .

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COMMENTS

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift [A Review]
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is one of the most enduring stories in English, still being read almost 300 years since it was first published. Its durability is due to its storytelling qualities though it is arguably more of a satire than a novel and the relevance of that satire may have diminished over time. Lemuel….
Book Review: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
About Jonathan Swift. Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for Whigs then for Tories), and poet, famous for works like Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, The Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, and A Tale of a Tub.Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his ...
Book Review: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
This book makes you a lover of satire beautifully penned in an interesting travel story. With lots of imagery, imaginations, and reality at play, this novel will definitely inspire you to keep on ...
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
First published in 1726, this collection of Lemuel Gulliver's fascinating voyages all over the world, has been loved, read and re-read by every child and adult familiar with the English language. The story appealing the children for its fictional quotient made of wonderful creatures ranging in size from a few inches to several feet, flying ...
'Gulliver's Travels' by Jonathan Swift (Review)
On the island of Lilliput, Gulliver finds himself towering above the tiny inhabitants while in the land of Brobdingnag the tables are turned, and the hapless traveller finds himself stranded in a realm of giants. The third journey sees him visiting the flying kingdom of Laputa, and the smaller islands it floats (and reigns) over, before the ...
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift Review
Swift has a deft eye for an excellent image, and a uproarious, often bawdy sense of humor. In writing Gulliver's Travels, he has created a legend which endures up to our times and beyond. Cite this Article. Gulliver's Travels is a fantastical adventure story suitable for children and adults alike, as well as a searing attack on the nature of ...
Book Review: 'Gulliver's Travels' by Jonathan Swift
Book Review. In Jonathan Swift's timeless masterpiece "Gulliver's Travels," initially published in 1726, satire, social commentary, and captivating travelogue converge to transport readers alongside Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon whose shipwrecks propel him into an array of fantastical islands.This classic work weaves satire and astute societal critique throughout its four ...
Book Review: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Book Title: Gulliver's Travels. Author: Jonathan Swift. Format/Print Length/Language: Paperback/336 pages/English. Publisher: Penguin; Revised ed. edition (30 January 2003) Book Blurb: Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver's Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon.
A Summary and Analysis of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's Travels: summary. Gulliver's Travels is structurally divided into four parts, each of which recounts the adventures of the title character, a ship's surgeon named Lemuel Gulliver, amongst some imaginary fantastical land. In the first part, Gulliver is shipwrecked and knocked unconscious on the island of Lilliput, which is ...
Gulliver's Travels: Full Book Analysis
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift is a celebrated satirical work in which Swift adopts the techniques of a standard travelogue to critique his own culture and its assumptions. The novel exaggerates the absurdity of the people and places the narrator describes, and in so doing mocks society. The novel's first-person narrator, Lemuel Gulliver, is straightforward, bereft of inner emotion ...
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift [Review]
It depends upon the audience's perspective. For instance, the book could be an engaging fantasy adventure tale for kids, a philosophical novel for a casual reader, or a satirical masterpiece for a bookworm. The storyline is almost absurd many times. But still, I found it to be creative. I would say Gulliver's Travels is a must-read book for ...
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
This classic satire follows the travels of a surgeon and sea captain who embarks on a series of extraordinary voyages. The protagonist first finds himself shipwrecked on an island inhabited by tiny people, later discovers a land of giants, then encounters a society of intelligent horses, and finally lands on a floating island of scientists ...
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. Gulliver's Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the ...
Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's Travels, four-part satirical work by Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift, published anonymously in 1726 as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World.A keystone of English literature, it is one of the books that contributed to the emergence of the novel as a literary form in English. A parody of the then popular travel narrative, Gulliver's Travels combines adventure with ...
Gulliver's Travels. By Jonathan Swift.
Gulliver's Travels is both a satire on human nature and a parody of popular travel narratives of the day. Swift's satirical fury — William Makepeace Thackeray called it "furious, raging, obscene" — is directed against almost every aspect of early-18th-century British life. The tale recounts the expedition of Lemuel Gulliver, a ...
Book Review: Gulliver's Travels , by Jonathan Swift
One-line summary: A satire, a children's story, and an early work of science fiction. Published 1726, Approximately 104,680 words.Available for free at Project Gutenberg. Gulliver's Travels is Jonathan Swift's satiric masterpiece, the fantastic tale of the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, an English ship's surgeon. First, he is shipwrecked in the land of Lilliput, where the alarmed residents ...
Project MUSE
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (review) J onathan S wift. Gulliver's Travels, ed. David Womersley. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2012. Pp. civ + 806. $130. This is the third volume to appear in print of the 18-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. The first two—Goldgar and Gadd's English Political Writings 1711-1714 ...
Gulliver's Travels Study Guide
Gulliver's Travels satirizes the form of the travel narrative, a popular literary genre that started with Richard Hakluyt's Voyages in 1589 and experienced immense popularity in eighteenth-century England through best-selling diaries and first-person accounts by explorers such as Captain James Cook. At the time, people were eager to hear about cultures and people in the faraway lands where ...
Book Review: Gulliver's Travels
The book opens with a very short account of his background, and then launches into his first voyage as a ship's surgeon. The book is divided into four parts: Part 1: Lilliput. Gulliver's boat is shipwrecked and he appears to be the lone survivor. He washes up on an island and wakes up realizing that he can't move.
Reflection on Gulliver's Travels Part One Essay (Book Review)
The author of A Voyage to Lilliput, which forms the first part of Gulliver's Travels, introduces the reader to a brief historical account of his own life encounters coupled with his own family.According to The Literature Network, one can tell his travel from the evident shipwrecks and abductions coupled with instances of making long swims in an attempt to make his life safe and sound (Para. 1).
Gulliver's Travels Book by Jonathan Swift: Book Review
The Gulliver's travels book was published in 1726 and I love how it still makes so much sense about human society and mentality. The way we treat animals and outsiders are undeniably bad. It shows us that if someone treats us the way we treat others, we will understand the problems they face.
Gulliver's Travels
First published in 1726, this book got immediate popularity and has never gone out-of-print since.Gulliver's Travels, written by Jonathan Swift who was a clergyman as well as an Irish writer, is a satire on human nature as well as a parody of the "traveller's tales" literary sub-genre.Also considered the best work by Swift and also an English literature classic, Cavehill in Belfast is ...

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Lilliput – The Land of Manikin

Brobdingnag – The Land of Giants

Laputa – The Flying Island

Balnibarbi – A Land of Ruins

Glubbdubdrib – A Land of Magicians