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Updated: May 11, 2025
To ship hogs 1,500 miles to be slaughtered and packed in food form, and then ship this manufactured product back to the source from which the raw material came; to feed a great city with grain, potatoes and fruits coming from 1,000 to 3,000 miles away, and vegetables from a distance of several hundred miles, while the farms within a radius of fifty miles are abandoned and barren; to make all the shoes for the nation in one small area, to spin the wool and cotton and weave the cloth in two or three others; to make the greater part of the furniture in one state, the automobiles in a second and the breakfast food in a third, is so preposterous a proposition that it belongs in Gulliver's Travels, not in the annals of a supposedly intelligent people.
So long as we can imagine the existence of giants and pigmies, it is easy to realize all the circumstances connected with Gulliver's existence among them, but it is impossible to feel the same sense of reality in regard to horses who live in houses they could not build, and who eat oats they could not harvest.
We shall find his pages caustic with wit, satire, and irony, and often disfigured with coarseness. One of the great pessimists of all time, he is yet tremendously in earnest in whatever he says, from his Drapier's Letters, written to protect Ireland from the schemes of English politicians, to his Gulliver's Travels, where he describes the court of Lilliput.
The Chief Secretary ended the talk by saying that the King, having great faith in Gulliver's strength, and depending on the oath which he had sworn before being released, expected him now to help in defeating the Blefuscan fleet. Gulliver was very ready to do what he could, and he at once thought of a plan whereby he might destroy the whole fleet at one blow.
The Tale of a Tub is so much superiour to his other writings, that one can hardly believe he was the authour of it: 'there is in it such a vigour of mind, such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature, and art, and life. I wondered to hear him say of Gulliver's Travels, 'When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest. I endeavoured to make a stand for Swift, and tried to rouse those who were much more able to defend him; but in vain.
It was finally decided that this sentence should be carried out, and twenty of the King's surgeons were ordered to be present in three days' time to see the operation of putting out Gulliver's eyes properly done. Sharp-pointed arrows were to be shot into the balls of his eyes. The courtier now left the house, as privately as he had come, and Gulliver was left to decide what he should do.
Do I think that the particular form of lying often seen in newspapers, under the title, "From our Foreign Correspondent," does any harm? Why, no, I don't know that it does. I suppose it doesn't really deceive people any more than the "Arabian Nights" or "Gulliver's Travels" do.
"Even then I felt Gleams like the flashing of a shield: the earth And common face of nature spake to me Rememberable things."* *Prelude, book i. He read, too, what he liked, spending many happy hours over Gulliver's Travels, and the Tale of a Tub, Don Quixote, and the Arabian Nights. While Wordsworth was still at school his father died.
He sees where men's detached intellect will eventually lead them, and he tells them the name of the place which is generally hell. Now of this detached and rational use of satire there is one great example in this book. Even Gulliver's Travels is hardly more reasonable than Martin Chuzzlewit's travels in the incredible land of the Americans.
Although, like "Gulliver's Travels," "Munchausen" might at first sight appear to be ill-suited, in more than one respect, for the nursery, yet it has proved the delight of children of all ages; and there are probably few, in the background of whose childish imagination the astonishing Munchausen has not at one time or another, together with Robinson Crusoe, Jack-the-Giant-Killer, and the Pied Piper of Hamelyn, assumed proportions at once gigantic and seductively picturesque.
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