Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels is a satirical novel by Jonathan Swift which influenced The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
The travel begins with a short preamble in which Lemuel Gulliver gives a brief outline of his life and history before his voyages.


 * 4 May 1699 – 13 April 1702

During his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a prisoner of a race of tiny people, less than 6 inches (15 cm) tall, who are inhabitants of the island country of Lilliput. After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the Lilliput Royal Court. He is also given permission by the King of Lilliput to go around the city on condition that he must not hurt their subjects.

At first, the Lilliputians are hospitable to Gulliver, but they are also wary of the threat that his size poses to them. The Lilliputians reveal themselves to be a people who put great emphasis on trivial matters. For example, which end of an egg a person cracks becomes the basis of a deep political rift within that nation. They are a people who revel in displays of authority and performances of power. Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours the Blefuscudians by stealing their fleet. However, he refuses to reduce the island nation of Blefuscu to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and the royal court.

Gulliver is charged with treason for, among other crimes, urinating in the capital though he was putting out a fire. He is convicted and sentenced to be blinded. With the assistance of a kind friend, "a considerable person at court", he escapes to Blefuscu. Here, he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing ship, which safely takes him back home with some Lilliputian animals he carries with him.

Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag

 * 20 June 1702 – 3 June 1706

Gulliver soon sets out again. When the sailing ship Adventure is blown off course by storms and forced to sail for land in search of fresh water, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and left on a peninsula on the western coast of the North American continent.

The grass of Brobdingnag is as tall as a tree. He is then found by a farmer who is about 72 ft (22 m) tall, judging from Gulliver estimating the man's step being 10 yards (9 m). The giant farmer brings Gulliver home, and his daughter Glumdalclitch cares for Gulliver. The farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. After a while the constant display makes Gulliver sick, and the farmer sells him to the queen of the realm. Glumdalclitch (who accompanied her father while exhibiting Gulliver) is taken into the queen's service to take care of the tiny man. Since Gulliver is too small to use their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the queen commissions a small house to be built for him so that he can be carried around in it; this is referred to as his "travelling box".

Between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with the King of Brobdingnag. The king is not happy with Gulliver's accounts of Europe, especially upon learning of the use of guns and cannon. On a trip to the seaside, his traveling box is seized by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box into the sea where he is picked up by sailors who return him to England.

Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan

 * 5 August 1706 – 16 April 1710

Setting out again, Gulliver's ship is attacked by pirates, and he is marooned close to a desolate rocky island near India. He is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music, mathematics, and astronomy but unable to use them for practical ends. Rather than using armies, Laputa has a custom of throwing rocks down at rebellious cities on the ground.

Gulliver tours Balnibarbi, the kingdom ruled from Laputa, as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by the blind pursuit of science without practical results, in a satire on bureaucracy and on the Royal Society and its experiments. At the Grand Academy of Lagado in Balnibarbi, great resources and manpower are employed on researching preposterous schemes such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble for use in pillows, learning how to mix paint by smell, and uncovering political conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons (see muckraking). Gulliver is then taken to Maldonada, the main port of Balnibarbi, to await a trader who can take him on to Japan.

While waiting for a passage, Gulliver takes a short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib which is southwest of Balnibarbi. On Glubbdubdrib, he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the "ancients versus moderns" theme in the book. The ghosts include Julius Caesar, Brutus, Homer, Aristotle, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi.

On the island of Luggnagg, he encounters the struldbrugs, people who are immortal. They do not have the gift of eternal youth, but suffer the infirmities of old age and are considered legally dead at the age of eighty.

After reaching Japan, Gulliver asks the Emperor "to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen of trampling upon the crucifix", which the Emperor does. Gulliver returns home, determined to stay there for the rest of his days.

Part IV: A Voyage to the Land of the houyhnhnms

 * 7 September 1710 – 5 December 1715

Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns to sea as the captain of a merchantman, as he is bored with his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage, he is forced to find new additions to his crew who, he believes, have turned against him. His crew then commits mutiny. After keeping him contained for some time, they resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across, and continue as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes upon a race of deformed savage humanoid creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly afterwards, he meets the houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses. They are the rulers while the deformed creatures that resemble human beings are called Yahoos.

Gulliver becomes a member of a horse's household and comes to both admire and emulate the houyhnhnms and their way of life, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and commands him to swim back to the land that he came from. Gulliver's "Master," the houyhnhnms who took him into his household, buys him time to create a canoe to make his departure easier. After another disastrous voyage, he is rescued against his will by a Portuguese ship. He is disgusted to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, whom he considers a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous, and generous person.

He returns to his home in England, but is unable to reconcile himself to living among "Yahoos" and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.

Editions

 * Swift, Jonathan Travels into several remote nations of the world: In four parts (1726) edited by Benjamin Motte
 * Swift, Jonathan Travels into several remote nations of the world: In four parts (Faulkner, George, 1735)
 * Swift, Jonathan The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift: Volume 4: Gulliver's Travels (1801)
 * https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Rev._Jonathan_Swift/Volume_6/Gulliver%27s_Travels
 * https://archive.org/details/worksofrevjonath06swif/page/n5/mode/2up
 * Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001) ISBN 0393957241 . Edited by Albert J. Rivero. Based on the 1726 text, with some adopted emendations from later corrections and editions. Also includes a selection of contextual material, letters, and criticism.
 * Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ISBN 978-0192805348 . Edited with an introduction by Claude Rawson and notes by Ian Higgins. Essentially based on the same text as the Essential Writings listed below with expanded notes and an introduction, although it lacks the selection of criticism.
 * Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008) ISBN 978-0141439495 . Edited with an introduction and notes by Robert DeMaria Jr. The copytext is based on the 1726 edition with emendations and additions from later texts and manuscripts.
 * Swift, Jonathan The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009) ISBN 978-0393930658 . Edited with an introduction by Claude Rawson and notes by Ian Higgins. This title contains the major works of Swift in full, including Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Tale of a Tub, Directions to Servants and many other poetic and prose works. Also included is a selection of contextual material, and criticism from Orwell to Rawson. The text of GT is taken from Faulkner's 1735 edition.

Derivative works

 * Prose
 * Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput (1727)
 * The New Gulliver, or the travels of John Gulliver, son of Captain Lemuel Gulliver (1730)
 * About Some Queer Little People (1874 periodical)
 * Voyage to Faremido (1916) & Capillaria (1921)
 * Gulliver's Fifth Travel – The Travel of Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships to the Land of Tikitaks
 * A Voyage to Inishneefa: A First-hand Account of the Fifth Voyage of Lemuel Gulliver (1987)
 * The Last Voyage of Captain Lemuel Gulliver (1998)
 * On Swift Wings: The Travails of Cygnus (2019)
 * Film
 * Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants (1902 film)
 * Gulliver in the Land of the Giants (1903 film)
 * Gulliver's Travels (1924 film)
 * Gulliver Mickey (1934 short cartoon)
 * The New Gulliver (1935 film)
 * Gulliver's Travels (1939 film)
 * The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960 film)
 * Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon (1965 film)
 * Case for a Rookie Hangman (1970 film)
 * Gulliver's Travels (1977 film)
 * Land of the Little People (2003 film)
 * Gulliver's Travels (2010 film)
 * Television
 * The Mind Robber (1968 serial)
 * The Adventures of Gulliver (1968–1969 TV series)
 * Saban's Gulliver's Travels (1992–1993 TV series)
 * Gulliver's Travels (1996 mini-series)
 * Gravity Falls: The Golf War (2014 TV-series episode)

Comparison to versions of Moreau
By topic
 * Book:
 * Original draft of Moreau (1894): There's a peculiar municipality with laws over trivial things.
 * Island of Doctor Moreau: The character returns to the mainland with a new fear of an animal nature within humans.


 * Beast-folk: "The inspiration for Moreau as Wells revised it unmistakably comes from the final book of Gulliver's Travels (1726). His sardonic emphasis on human beings as superficially civilized animals is Swiftian, and so is his satiric method, the shifts in perspective which give Moreau's vision a 'stereoscopic quality.' In effect. Wells 'darwinizes' the Yahoos and houyhnhnms. The beast Homo sapiens evolved from and the more nearly rational creature the species may yet evolve into become the temporal boundaries of Moreau's universe, whose conceptual possibilities Wells plays off against each other in order to explore the nature of humankind as it is at present." "After [Prendick] contrives to escape from 'the painful disorder' of the island, the persuasion that had overwhelmed Gulliver takes hold of him: 'I felt no desire to return to mankind.' But while he shares this (dis)inclination with Gulliver, Prendick’s dread of being exposed to human brutishness derives from a somewhat different—albeit complementary—experience. Gulliver, having spent most of his Fourth Voyage in the company of the houyhnhnms, disdains his fellow humans chiefly for their contrast to those perfectly rational creatures. Prendick, on the other hand, has journeyed into the depths of brutality; and after a sojourn of almost a year among the Yahoos (as it were), he has come to fear our similarity to them. The sight of others of his kind often reminds him of the Beast People, and he is haunted by the nightmarish idea “that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale."


 * Unreliable narrator: "Though Prendick would have us believe that he is a neutral or detached observer, Wells gives us clues that he is instead a significant agent in the events devolving on Noble’s Isle. Nor does Prendick’s responsibility for their course stem only from what (largely by his own acknowledgment) he fails to do after Moreau’s demise. Long before that, in attempting to escape from the Doctor, he contributed by his words and deeds to the undermining of Moreau’s status and authority and thence to the “degradation” which ultimately ensues among the Beast People. The fiction, then, like the Fourth Book of Gulliver’s Travels, contains a “hidden” plot according to which the narrator-protagonist unconsciously exerts a corrupting influence on the islanders; and as in Swift, this has an ironic effect because it distances Prendick from an author who elsewise encourages us to identify himself with his narrator."