Gulliver’s Travels is a satirical novel by Jonathan Swift, first published anonymously in 1726. The book is a fictional travelogue of four fictional voyages to various locations around the world. It follows the travels of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who spends sixteen years on three voyages to places such as South America, the Pacific islands and the land of Lilliput.
In “Gulliver’s Travels”, Jonathan Swift satirizes the political and social state of England during his time. He does this by creating a fictional world that is a mirror image of England, with each character representing a different aspect of English society.
For example, in the first part of the book, Gulliver travels to Lilliput where he meets the Lilliputians who are 6 inches tall. The Lilliputians are ruled by the Emperor who has so much power that he can order people to be beheaded or put in stocks. The Emperor represents King George I of England who was known to be cruel and ruthless towards his subjects.
Throughout the book, Swift uses Gulliver’s extraordinary adventures to critique events in his day and age such as the Glorious Revolution, corruption in government and religious differences among Enlightenment intellectuals. Through the practices of Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, Swift exposes the contradictory nature of human behavior. Though he mocks several aspects of society through exaggeration, one of the most prominent satire topics that appears throughout Gulliver’s Travels is colonialism. On a few occasions Gulliver visits places where he clearly represents an oppressed class colonized by others, quite similar to how British were dominating over Ireland at that time – illustrating Swift’s awareness towards imperialism as well as highlighting its many absurdities.
