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ОглавлениеAbout the Author
To become a writer of novels at the turn of the 18th century one needed to be in a position of relative privilege. Life was generally hard going and most people worked themselves to the bone to feed their families. Any spare time outside of making a living was spent resting or in prayer.
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was lucky enough to have been born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family. He earned his degree at university in Dublin and then moved to England for several years. Whilst in England, Swift secured a job as secretary to an important statesman and was so successful in his role that he conducted affairs with King William III following the Glorious Revolution – the usurping of King James II, the last Catholic monarch. Swift travelled back and forth between Ireland and England over the next few years. During this time he became politically active and used his writing ability for propaganda purposes. He quickly learnt the power of the written word and became interested in writing allegorical works of fiction.
By the time Swift began writing his most famous book, Gulliver’s Travels, he was already into his fifties and a well-rounded writer. He chose to use a pseudonym because the story of Gulliver was rich with hidden political comment and he was associated with the Tories who had recently fallen into disrepute on charges of treason.
Despite it being essentially a children’s book by today’s standards, Gulliver’s Travels was an immediate success, not least because nothing similar had been written before. The book had an appeal because it worked on many different levels – children could take the story at face value, whilst an adult might understand the allegory and allusion behind the imagery.
Gulliver’s Travels has now become one of the seminal works of English literature. Like the contemporaneous Robinson Crusoe, Swift understood that the foremost role of literature was to entertain. People wanted to immerse themselves in a story and imagine themselves in far-flung, exotic locations. The early novel acted as a portal into another realm, where people could forget about their woes and immerse themselves into a fantasy world of make believe. Considering that Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels are 300 years old it says a great deal about their fundamental power of engagement that people still revere these books as classic novels. The vocabulary, grammar and phrasing could feel rather dated to a modern-day audience, however the plot and subtext remain as pertinent today as they have always been.
Swift lived until 77 years of age and in his final years became obsessed with death, because he saw so many friends pass away while he lived on. He eventually suffered a stroke and spent three years unable to speak. In his writing he compared his condition to an old tree dying from the canopy downwards.
Gulliver’s Travels
An interesting thing to note about Gulliver’s Travels is that this title is not the original. The book was first titled Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. The author, Jonathan Swift used the pseudonym Lemuel Gulliver, so the title of the novel became abbreviated to Gulliver’s Travels, because that was the phrase used by people in describing the book.
This was a very early novel as it was published in 1726. In fact it is arguably one of the first modern English novels. The term ‘novel’ had only been used since the 1680s and Robinson Crusoe had been published only seven years prior to Gulliver’s Travels. While Robinson Crusoe is essentially a work of realism, Gulliver’s Travels is one of fantasy. That is to say, the former is based on true events and could therefore conceivably happen, while the latter includes fanciful ideas that might be the product of mind alteration, vivid dreams or an extremely fertile imagination. The first two parts of the book find Gulliver in a land of miniature people and then a land of giants. He then visits a land where he speaks with ghosts in the company of an immortal old man, before discovering a place where anthropomorphic horses rule over primitive humans.
Swift’s work of wild experimentation proved him something of a polymath and anthropologist. He was primarily interested in the nature of the human condition, so he used his fantastical imaginings as a way of satirising and revealing the underlying failings of humanity. For an individual living in the early 18th century it was a unique mind that could claim to have that degree of insight. Swift was an Irish Dean, living in Dublin. As a devout Christian he seems to have had something of a chip on his shoulder about scientists. He viewed their work as purely academic and of no practical use, and he pokes fun at science in the third part of the book where he meets a population who although very learned, lack common sense. At that time natural philosophers, as scientists were then known, had begun to unravel the workings of the world. For example, Isaac Newton had expounded his theory of gravity and the composition of white light. These ideas suggested that the world was explainable in a way that didn’t require a god, so such ungodly work was open to ridicule. There is a certain level of hypocrisy on the part of Swift however, as he experiments with concepts of scale and toys with other ideas that were in the public domain as a result of the scientific progress being made at the time.
In regards to the anthropomorphic horses that appear in Gulliver’s Travels, it would seem that he held the notion that due to their dignified silence and work ethic, horses were representative of the more sophisticated qualities desirable in people. At the time, polite society viewed godliness as being as far away from the inner animal as possible. With concepts of evolution still a long way off and an acceptance of primal beginnings, people had the idea that ideal behaviour should be very controlled, restricted and confined, as if the mind were detached from the body.
Swift evidently observed these vulgarities in other people and imagined that if horses could talk, they would portray those characteristics that he viewed as more desirable. Horses were an integral and intimate part of everyday life at the time Swift was writing, although to a modern-day reader it seems a tad esoteric and eccentric to place horses on a pedestal in such a way.
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