Gulliver’s Travels

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'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.'

Shipwrecked on the high seas, Lemuel Gulliver finds himself washed up on the strange island of Lilliput, a land inhabited by quarrelsome miniature people. On his travels he continues to meet others who force him to reflect on human behaviour – the giants of Brobdingnag, the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. In this scathing satire on the politics and morals of the 18th Century, Swift's condemnation of society and its institutions still resonates today.

About the author

Born in Dublin in 1667, Jonathan Swift was an satirist, essayist and Anglican cleric most famous for his 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels. Initially publishing anonymously or under pseudonyms such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier, he made a name for himself for his deadpan and ironic style exemplified by his satirical essay, A Modest Proposal (1729). He died in 1745.