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Updated: May 11, 2025
While in what he called his "exile" he wrote Gulliver's Travels, which was at first published anonymously, the secret of the authorship being so closely guarded that the publisher did not know who was the author. Dr. Johnson characterized it as "A production so new and strange that it filled the reader with admiration and amazement. It was read by the high and low, the learned and the illiterate."
This earnestness and circumstantial minuteness throw an air of reality around his most grotesque creations. He pretended to despise Defoe; yet the influence of that great writer, who made fiction seem as real as fact, is plainly apparent in Gulliver's remarkable adventures. Although sublimity and pathos are outside of his range, his style is remarkably well adapted to his special subject matter.
On a level spot of grass, at the foot of the guidepost, appeared an object, which, though locomotive on a different principle, reminded me of Gulliver's portable mansion among the Brobdignags. It was a huge covered wagon, or, more properly, a small house on wheels, with a door on one side and a window shaded by green blinds on the other.
Neely had brought with him, to while away dull hours, a copy of "Gulliver's Travels"; and in describing Neely's successful hunt for buffalo one day, Boone in after years amusingly deposed: "In the year 1770 I encamped on Red River with five other men, and we had with us for our amusement the History of Samuel Gulliver's Travels, wherein he gave an account of his young master, Glumdelick, careing him on market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud.
To which I replied with the names of a dozen or more of the simple, every-day classics that the school-boy and-girl are supposed to have read. They had never heard of "David Copperfield" or of Dickens. Nor had they ever heard of "Gulliver's Travels," nor of "The Vicar of Wakefield." They had heard the name "Robinson Crusoe," but they did not know it was the name of an entrancing romance.
Little Jacket was not long in discovering the advantage of this fact, for they might be obliged, when night came on, to retire into these shells, as they saw no house anywhere within sight. Now, Little Jacket had read Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver's Travels, and had half believed the wonderful stories of Brobdignag; but he never thought that he should ever be actually wrecked on a giant's island.
Its wit and idiom were like those of the English literary tradition; and its few touches of local colour seemed merely accidental, like those of an Englishman who happened to be living in Switzerland or Sweden. My father and my father's friends were rightly enthusiastic for the book; so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance like Gulliver's Travels or Tristram Shandy.
He studied faithfully the few in the house the Shakespeare, the Pilgrim's Progress, Milton, and Gulliver's Travels. The others wondered at him. They could not understand how any one who could handle a gun or a musical instrument could lay finger on a book. "Made-up things," said Abner once, with a scornful motion towards Shakespeare.
The trolley had stopped for a little to breathe the horses, and one of the officers of the King's Guard who had not before seen Gulliver, climbed with some friends up his body. While looking at his face, the officer could not resist the temptation of putting the point of his sword up Gulliver's nose, which tickled him so that he woke, sneezing violently.
The injustice under which Ireland suffered, her perversity in raising large families to certain poverty, and the indifference of English politicians to her suffering and protests are all mercilessly portrayed; but why? That is still the unanswered problem of Swift's life and writings. Swift's two greatest satires are his Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels.
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