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SwiftSwift1667-17451667-1745

• Jonathan Swift, Irish author and journalist, the foremost prose satirist in the English language. Swift's best known work is Gulliver's Travels (1726).Swift was born in Dublin on November 30,1667. He studied at Kilkenny Grammar School (1674-82) and at Trinity College in Dublin (1682-89), receiving his B.A. in 1868 and M.A. in 1692.

• In 1695 Swift was ordained in the Church of Ireland (Anglican), Dublin. He made several trips to London and gained fame with his essays. Throughout the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14), Swift was one of the central figures in the literary and political life of London. He was a founder member of the Scriblerus Club.

Queen Anne

• 1710 Swift tried to open a political career among the Whigs but changed his party and took over the Tory journal The Examiner. With the accession of George I, the Tories lost political power and Swift withdrew to Ireland. From 1713 to 1742 he was the dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Swift's religious writing is little read today.

King George I

• His most famous works other than Gulliver's Travels include The Battle Of The Books (1697) which explores the merits of the ancients and the moderns in literature and A Tale Of A Tub (1704), a religious satire. In Arguments Against Abolishing Christianity (1708) the narrator argues for the preservation of the Christian religion as a social necessity.

Gulliver’s TravelsGulliver’s Travels

• Jonathan’s masterpiece, “Gulliver’s Travels” appeared in 1726. It is divided into four books, but the young people prefer only two of them: Gulliver’s voyages to Lilliput

( where the people are six inches high) and Brobdingnag (where the people are giants). The Lilliputians fight wars which seem foolish. The King of Brobdingnag thinks that people are the most terrible creatures on the Earth.

• When an ignorant cobbler named John Partridge published an almanac of astrological predictions, Swift parodied it in his book Prediction For The Ensuing Year By Issac Bickerstaff.

• He foretold the death of John Partridge on March 1708, and affirmed on that day his prediction. Partridge protested that he was alive but Swift 'proved' in his "Vindication" that he was dead. The Drapier's Letters (1724) were written against the monopoly granted by the English government to William Wood to provide the Irish with copper coinage.

• In the satirical essay "A Modest Proposal" (1729) Swift with horrifying logic recommends that Irish poverty can solved by the breeding up their infants as food for the rich. Swift died on October 19, 1745 and was buried in St Patrick's cathedral.

Swift’s Death Mask and GraveIn St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Introduction Introduction Gulliver's Travels is an adventure story (in reality,

a misadventure story) involving several voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, who, because of a series of mishaps en route to recognized ports, ends up, instead, on several unknown islands living with people and animals of unusual sizes, behaviors, and philosophies, but who, after each adventure, is somehow able to return to his home in England where he recovers from these unusual experiences and then sets out again on a new voyage.

Book I:Book I:• When the ship Gulliver is traveling on is destroyed in a

storm, Gulliver ends up on the island of Lilliput, where he awakes to find that he has been captured by Lilliputians, very small people — approximately six inches in height.

• Gulliver is treated with compassion and concern. In turn, he helps them solve some of their problems, especially their conflict with their enemy, Blefuscu, an island across the bay from them.

• Gulliver falls from favor, however, because he refuses to support the Emperor's desire to enslave the Blefuscudians and because he "makes water" to put out a palace fire. Gulliver flees to Blefuscu, where he converts a large war ship to his own use and sets sail from Blefuscu eventually to be rescued at sea by an English merchant ship and returned to his home in England.

Book II: Book II: • As he travels as a ship's surgeon, Gulliver

and a small crew are sent to find water on an island. Instead they encounter a land of giants. As the crew flees, Gulliver is left behind and captured. Gulliver's captor, a farmer, takes him to the farmer's home where Gulliver is treated kindly, but, of course, curiously. 

• The farmer assigns his daughter, Glumdalclitch, to be Gulliver's keeper, and she cares for Gulliver with great compassion.

• The farmer takes Gulliver on tour across the countryside, displaying him to onlookers. Eventually, the farmer sells Gulliver to the Queen.

• At court, Gulliver meets the King, and the two spend many sessions discussing the customs and behaviors of Gulliver's country.

• In many cases, the King is shocked and chagrined by the selfishness and pettiness that he hears Gulliver describe. Gulliver, on the other hand, defends England.

• One day, on the beach, as Gulliver looks longingly at the sea from his box (portable room), he is snatched up by an eagle and eventually dropped into the sea.

• A passing ship spots the floating chest and rescues Gulliver, eventually returning him to England and his family.

Book III:Book III:• Gulliver is on a ship bound for the Levant. After

arriving, Gulliver is assigned captain of a sloop to visit nearby islands and establish trade.

• On this trip, pirates attack the sloop and place Gulliver in a small boat to fend for himself.

• While drifting at sea, Gulliver discovers a Flying Island. While on the Flying Island, called Laputa, Gulliver meets several inhabitants, including the King.

• All are preoccupied with things associated with mathematics and music.

•  In addition, astronomers use the laws of magnetism to move the island up, down, forward, backward, and sideways, thus controlling the island's movements in relation to the island below (Balnibarbi).

• While in this land, Gulliver visits Balnibarbi, the island of Glubbdubdrib, and Luggnagg.

• Gulliver finally arrives in Japan where he meets the Japanese emperor. From there, he goes to Amsterdam and eventually home to England.

Book IV:Book IV:•  While Gulliver is captain of a merchant ship

bound for Barbados and the Leeward Islands, several of his crew become ill and die on the voyage.

• Gulliver hires several replacement sailors in Barbados. These replacements turn out to be pirates who convince the other crew members to mutiny.

• As a result, Gulliver is deposited on a "strand" (an island) to fend for himself. Almost immediately, he is discovered by a herd of ugly, despicable human-like creatures who are called, he later

learns, Yahoos. 

• They attack him by climbing trees and defecating on him.

• He is saved from this disgrace by the appearance of a horse, identified, he later learns, by the name Houyhnhnm.

• The grey horse (a Houyhnhnm) takes Gulliver to his home, where he is introduced to the grey's mare (wife), a colt and a foal (children), and a sorrel nag (the servant).

• Gulliver also sees that the Yahoos are kept in pens away from the house.

• It becomes immediately clear that, except for Gulliver's clothing, he and the Yahoos are the same animal.

• From this point on, Gulliver and his master (the grey) begin a series of discussions about the evolution of Yahoos, about topics, concepts, and behaviors related to the Yahoo society, which Gulliver represents, and about the society of the Houyhnhnms.

• Despite his favored treatment in the grey steed's home, the kingdom's Assembly determines that Gulliver is a Yahoo and must either live with the uncivilized Yahoos or return to his own world.

• With great sadness, Gulliver takes his leave of the Houyhnhnms.

• He builds a canoe and sails to a nearby island where he is eventually found hiding by a crew from a Portuguese ship.

• The ship's captain returns Gulliver to Lisbon, where he lives in the captain's home.

• Gulliver is so repelled by the sight and smell of these "civilized Yahoos" that he can't stand to be around them.

• Eventually, however, Gulliver agrees to return to his family in England.

• Upon his arrival, he is repelled by his Yahoo family, so he buys two horses and spends most of his days caring for and conversing with the horses in the stable in order to be as far away from his Yahoo family as possible.

•

Characters Characters • Gulliver - • The narrator and protagonist of the story. Although Lemuel

Gulliver’s vivid and detailed style of narration makes it clear that he is intelligent and well educated, his perceptions are naïve and gullible. He has virtually no emotional life, or at least no awareness of it, and his comments are strictly factual. Indeed, sometimes his obsession with the facts of navigation, for example, becomes unbearable for us, as his fictional editor, Richard Sympson, makes clear when he explains having had to cut out nearly half of Gulliver’s verbiage. Gulliver never thinks that the absurdities he encounters are funny and never makes the satiric connections between the lands he visits and his own home. Gulliver’s naïveté makes the satire possible, as we pick up on things that Gulliver does not notice

• The emperor -  The ruler of Lilliput. Like all Lilliputians, the emperor is fewer than six inches tall. His power and majesty impress Gulliver deeply, but to us he appears both laughable and sinister. Because of his tiny size, his belief that he can control Gulliver seems silly, but his willingness to execute his subjects for minor reasons of politics or honor gives him a frightening aspect. He is proud of possessing the tallest trees and biggest palace in the kingdom, but he is also quite hospitable, spending a fortune on his captive’s food. The emperor is both a satire of the autocratic ruler and a strangely serious portrait of political power.

• Yahoos -  Unkempt humanlike beasts who live in servitude to the Houyhnhnms. Yahoos seem to belong to various ethnic groups, since there are blond Yahoos as well as dark-haired and redheaded ones. The men are characterized by their hairy bodies, and the women by their low-hanging breasts. They are naked, filthy, and extremely primitive in their eating habits. Yahoos are not capable of government, and thus they are kept as servants to the Houyhnhnms, pulling their carriages and performing manual tasks. They repel Gulliver with their lascivious sexual appetites, especially when an eleven-year-old Yahoo girl attempts to rape Gulliver as he is bathing naked. Yet despite Gulliver’s revulsion for these disgusting creatures, he ends his writings referring to himself as a Yahoo, just as the Houyhnhnms do as they regretfully evict him from their realm. Thus, “Yahoo” becomes another term for human, at least in the semideranged and self-loathing mind of Gulliver at the end of his fourth journey.

• Houyhnhnms -  Rational horses who maintain a simple, peaceful society governed by reason and truthfulness—they do not even have a word for “lie” in their language. Houyhnhnms are like ordinary horses, except that they are highly intelligent and deeply wise. They live in a sort of socialist republic, with the needs of the community put before individual desires. They are the masters of the Yahoos, the savage humanlike creatures in Houyhnhnmland. In all, the Houyhnhnms have the greatest impact on Gulliver throughout all his four voyages. He is grieved to leave them, not relieved as he is in leaving the other three lands, and back in England he relates better with his horses than with his human family. The Houyhnhnms thus are a measure of the extent to which Gulliver has become a misanthrope, or “human-hater”; he is certainly, at the end, a horse lover.