In March 1726, Irish clergyman Jonathan Swift visited London and arranged for a courier to deliver the manuscript to the publisher under the cover of night. The Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin knew his novel would cause trouble and wanted it published anonymously. The manuscript was titled Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, and the satirical work was published that October. Three centuries later, it is known as Gulliver's Travels.
The work immediately became a sensation, mocking Georgian pretensions and entering popular culture through translations, children's versions, comics and films. The anniversary is being marked at Swift's alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, and at events across Ireland. Exhibitions, festivals, seminars, art competitions and workshops explore the origins of Swift's masterpiece, its retelling through a feminist lens and its prophetic depiction of a society in the thrall of artificial intelligence.
Stephanie Breen, assistant librarian and co-curator of the exhibition at Trinity, stated that Lemuel Gulliver's first journey to the land of Lilliput is the most well-known to today's audience. The exhibition runs until December and is available online. It draws on the university's collection of hundreds of editions and popularisations of Gulliver's Travels, including engraved illustrations, pop-up versions, a Marvel comic from 1976 and the only known surviving copy of an abridged edition printed in 1761.
Aileen Douglas, professor of English and co-curator of the exhibition, stated that the voice of Gulliver's wife Mary, who is neglected and left at home 'pregnant' until his final, grudging return, is imagined through contemporary works such as Alison Fell's The Mistress of Lilliput and Lauren Chater's Gulliver's Wife. Douglas stated that Gulliver's experiences in Laputa, a floating island dedicated to art and science, resonate with today's anxieties about technology. The inhabitants of Laputa attempt to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and gain knowledge through a 'machine' of wires, handles and paper that can produce treatises on philosophy, poetry and mathematics 'without the least assistance of genius or learning'. In the kingdom of Luggnagg, Gulliver is first fascinated, then horrified, by the Struldbruggs, a race that is immortal but eternally old and diseased.
A panel discussion on the role of art in challenging power and Gulliver's attacks on human vanity and scientific arrogance will be held at Trinity on Wednesday. In the cathedral, a children's choir will perform the premiere of a work by composer Seán Doherty, alongside organ recitals and excerpts from Gulliver's Travels to be read by Swift scholar Brendan Twomey. The exhibition and a series of lectures in the Robinson Library in Armagh district run until December.
Swift was born in 1667 and combined his duties in the Irish church with pamphlets and essays that pioneered dead, savage satire, including A Modest Proposal, which suggested alleviating the distress of Irish poor by selling their children as food to the rich. Gulliver's Travels was written in Dublin and at an estate in County Meath, where it is said that some very tall and very short farm workers inspired the narrative. After shipwrecking in Lilliput, Gulliver discovers tiny inhabitants waging war against a rival kingdom over which end of a boiled egg should be broken – a satire on European sectarian conflicts. Gulliver captures the Blefuscuian fleet and extinguishes a fire in the Lilliputian palace by urinating on it. Stranded among giants in Brobdingnag, Gulliver's stories of his 'own dear native country' inadvertently reveal its corruption and cruelty, prompting the Brobdingnagian ruler to declare humanity 'the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that ever crawled upon the face of the earth'.
Swift's publisher Benjamin Motte did not know the identity of his author, but the book's success and Swift's literary reputation allowed many to guess, Douglas stated. 'People somehow knew it was him,' Douglas said.
