Gulliver’s Travels

Jonathan Swift (30th November 1667-19th October 1745), the author, was an Anglo-Irish essayist, satirist, poet. His notable works are 'A Tale of a Tub', 'Drapier's Letters', 'A Modest Proposal'. The book is the international best seller and got huge success. According to Robert McCrum 'Gulliver's Travel' is "a satirical masterpiece".

Swift's family has several interesting literary connections. His grandmother Elizabeth Swift was the niece of Sir Erasmus Dryden, grandfather of poet John Dryden. The same grandmother's and Katherine Dryden was a first cousin of Elizabeth, wife of Sir Walter Raleigh. His uncle Thomas Swift married a daughter of poet and playwright Sir William Davenant, a godson of William Shakespeare.



Jonathan Swift's satirical narrative, Gulliver's Travels (1726), has retained its popularity with children and adults alike for two and a half centuries for its inventiveness, wit, narrative strength and black humour. The four parts of the narrative describe the adventures of Gulliver, the ship's surgeon, among the Lilliputians, six inches high, the Brobdingnagians, tall as church steeples, the Laputans, the thoroughly impractical philosophers, historians, scientists and mathematicians and finally the Houyhnhnms, noble horses endowed with rationality far beyond the reach of human beings. In all the narratives, Man is shown in contrast with these diverse creations of Swift's imagination and the result shows how vain, contentious, brutal and self-deceiving humans are and how they epitomize each of the seven deadly sins.