Gulliver’s Travels at 300: why Swift’s book is far sharper than it looks

On 28 October 1726 a book appeared in London that has been read around the world ever since: Gulliver’s Travels. Its author, the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, published it anonymously, and it became an instant sensation. Exactly 300 years on, it is still reprinted, filmed and retold to children.

Four voyages

The ship’s surgeon Lemuel Gulliver washes up in four strange lands. First Lilliput, whose people are the size of a finger (the source of the word “Lilliputian”). Then Brobdingnag, a land of giants where Gulliver himself seems tiny. The third part brings the flying island of Laputa and the academy in the city of Lagado. And finally the country of the Houyhnhnms, rational horses, set against the brutish, human-like Yahoos – a word that has meant a coarse, ignorant person in English ever since.

Not a children’s tale

Lilliputians and giants made the book famous, but Swift meant something else. Gulliver’s Travels is a savage political satire on the England of his day – court intrigue, party strife and pointless wars. Lilliput goes to war with its neighbour over which end of a boiled egg – the big or the little – is the correct one to crack. Beneath the joke Swift mocked the religious and political quarrels over which real blood was spilled.

Mocking science – and a machine that writes books

In the third part Gulliver visits the Grand Academy of Lagado, where “projectors” pursue absurd experiments: extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, turning ice into gunpowder. It was Swift’s satire on the detached science of his age.

The most striking invention is a machine for writing books. It is a huge frame of blocks carrying every word of the language; students turn handles, the words fall into random combinations, and the better lines are copied out into treatises “on philosophy, poetry, politics” – with no talent or knowledge at all. Three centuries before computers, Swift in effect described machine-generated text, and was the first to mock the idea that books could be produced mechanically. The scene is often recalled today in debates about artificial intelligence.

Why it still gets read

The book gave English the words “Lilliputian” and “yahoo”, and its story proved so durable that it lives in two versions at once: a biting adult satire for those who catch the hints, and a gentle children’s tale about little people and giants. For anyone learning English it is worth opening the original: Swift’s prose is clear and his irony timeless. Three hundred years on, his mockery of vanity, foolish wars and blind faith in progress sounds remarkably fresh.