ACCORDING to Dublin writer Jonathan Swift, on May 4th, 1699 Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon sets sail on The Antelope from Bristol harbour on his first journey.
May the Fourth is today widely known as Star Wars Day. But of course no one said to Lemuel as the ship sailed out of port that spring morning headed initially for the South Seas, “May the Force be with you.”
Instead his adventures and meetings “Into Several Remote Nations of the World” saw him involved in various intrigues, fights and disputes.
His misadventures become more calamitous and grim as time goes on. He is shipwrecked, abandoned, then attacked by strangers, then attacked by his own crew.
Plot:
Lemuel Gulliver travels to strange places such as Brobdingnag and Lilliput to meditate on their ghastliness.
But the self-important Gulliver fails to see that the terrible worlds he visits are entirely like his own. He embarks on four voyages in total, each darker and more misanthropic than the last. In the voyages Swift presents a complex understanding of how lying and honesty fit into human nature.
Message:
We are all condemned to vanity, misanthropy, or at best indifference. (Swift offers indifference as a form of salvation. And yes, this was published 299 years ago, in 1726)
Is the message usually adhered to by film makers?
Rarely. Most feature wacky high jinks in Lilliput. You’d hardly know that Gulliver ends up preferring the company of horses to people.
Inspiration of main protagonist:
It’s claimed that the idea of Gulliver came to Swift as he passed the profile of ‘Napoleon’s Nose’ on Cavehill in Belfast. (The writer served as vicar in Kilroot, near Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim so would have known Belfast well).
But this is only speculative, and no contemporaneous evidence exists that Swift got his giant idea from a hill in Belfast.
Influence:
A Tyrone connection of all things, probably equally speculative. All the same, see what you make of this . . .
On BBC Radio 4, Dr Ben Garrod explored the phenomenon in his programme Bone Stories, The Irish Giant.
Dr Garrod spoke first to a Tyrone man called Brendan Holland who at the age of 14 was already 6ft 7ins. In 1972 Brendan journeyed to London looking for work, but inexorably his health deteriorated. He was eventually diagnosed with gigantism at St Bart’s in London. Gigantism, or acromegaly, is a disease caused by over-production of growth hormone in the pituitary gland.
Dr Garrod then went on to talk about 18th century Irish ‘giant’ Charles Byrne who grew to a height of 7ft 7ins. He was also from Tyrone — from a village close to Cookstown. It seems there may have been a cluster of acromegaly in Tyrone.
Ben Garrod finished this fascinating programme with an observation: “In 1776 Gulliver’s Travels was published,” he said. “It was written by Jonathan Swift on a journey to Co. Tyrone [indeed while he was staying in Cookstown]. Surely not a coincidence.”
And the name ‘Gulliver’ — not really a common Belfast name, or even a Dublin one, is it?
No indeed. To investigate more we need to make our own journey — to St Mary's Church in Banbury, Oxfordshire. In the preface to the 1726 edition of his novel, Swift mentions observing "several tombs and monuments of the Gullivers" in the churchyard at Banbury, suggesting that the name of Lemuel Gulliver was inspired by these gravestones .
Although the original tombstones no longer exist, a later one bearing the Gulliver name remains near a commemorative plaque in the churchyard. The Gulliver family had a longstanding presence in the Banbury area, with records tracing their lineage back to the 16th century.
Places visited by Gulliver:
Lilliput is the one that has entered popular imagination. Gulliver doesn’t seem to like it one little bit: “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth," he announces.
Brobdingnag fares little better:
"The learning of this people is very defective; consisting only in morality, history, poetry, and mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel,” he says of the inhabitants.
Example of Swift’s true political satire:
The war between the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians in Lilliput. The war is based on a reading from the holy book of Lilliput the Brundecral which states in no uncertain terms: That all true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end. This is Swift at his best satirising the religious schism created by Henry VIII’s break with Rome, leading eventually to the English Civil War. It’s also a prototype for all wars driven by minor dogmas.
Words invented by Swift, now part of the language:
The first name Vanessa, and the word ‘yahooo’ - the vicious disgusting creatures which Gulliver encounters in his fourth voyage. Yahoo is now a Silicon Valley company.
Parts often left out of children’s books:
The Academy of Lagado’s attempts to “reduce human Excrement to its original Food.”
The Academy’s plans to extract sunbeams from cucumbers is usually preferred.
What they thought then:
The novelist Thackeray thought the Travels were brilliant, but qualified this by saying it was “filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.” Voltaire hailed Swift as the ‘English’ Rabelais. Michael Foot (former leader of the Labour party) declared: “Everyone standing for political office in Dublin, the United States or London should have a compulsory examination in Gulliver’s Travels.”
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley were both influenced by the book.
What we think now:
A classic, a satire, a proto-Black Mirror, a proto-science fiction book, and a forerunner of the modern novel.
What Swift would have made of the fact’s that Gulliver’s Travels is usually mistaken for a children’s book:
He would have appreciated the bitter irony that the book, which he wrote as a biting satire aimed at a depraved and miserable universe, has become a children’s story of Disneyland proportions.
Swift’s Spiritual Descendant: Henry Hazlitt?
Hazlitt, in Economics in One Lesson, described an island where everyone is employed doing everyone else’s laundry, thus boosting GDP — but accomplishing nothing.
It’s a Swiftian parable of economic absurdity.
Gulliver’s Lagado and Hazlitt’s laundry island are two sides of the same satirical coin.
See More: Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
