Gulliver's Travels is a prose romance by Jonathan Swift, published in 1726. It is a satire on the social and political conditions existing in England during the early part of the eighteenth century. Lemuel Gulliver, a blunt but honest ship's surgeon, describes four voyages, one to the country of Lilliput, where a man is no larger than the traveler's little finger; a second to Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants and all else are on a gigantic scale,—wheat as tall as oaks, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens as big as turkeys; a third to the flying island of Laputa, inhabited by philosophers and astronomers; and a fourth to the country of the Houyhnhnms, where horses are the reasoning beings and men, called Yahoos, are degraded and unreasoning brutes. The characters introduced, the habits and political conditions described, were easily recognizable as real persons, real customs, and real political ideas in, England. In the first voyage the satire is light and playful, but it grows extremely bitter as the tale advances. The plan of the romance gave Swift an excellent opportunity to hold objectionable people and public measures up to ridicule and spiteful remark. This part of the interest has faded, but Gulliver's Travels is still a notable book, one of a short list that every intelligent reader must know.
In the voyage to Laputa the satire is directed against the vanity of human wisdom, and the folly of abandoning useful occupations for the empty schemes of visionaries. The philosophers of Laputa had allowed their land to run waste and their people to fall into poverty, in their attempts to "soften marble for pillows and pin-cushions," to "petrify the hoofs of a living horse to prevent them from foundering," to "sow land with chaif," and to "extract sunbeams from cucumbers," which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.—Tuckerman.
Whether we read it, as children do, for the story, or as historians, for the political allusions, or as men of the world, for the satire and philosophy, we have to acknowledge that it is one of the wonderful and unique books of the world's literature.—Gosse.
