The Origins of Gulliver's Travels

Abstract

Until the publication of The Letters of Jonathan Swift to Charles Ford, literary scholars thought that Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels between 1715 and 1720, a period when he published almost nothing. His starting point was, they believed, sketches made up by the Scriblerus group—Pope, Swift, and others—in 1713 and 1714, and finally produced by Pope in 1741. Then D. Nichol Smith, in his edition of the Ford letters, proved that Swift wrote Part i of Gulliver in about 1721–22, Part ii around 1722–23, Part iv in 1723, and Part iii (after Pt. iv) in 1724–25. Swift continued to revise it, probably until it was published in the autumn of 1726.

Gulliver’s Travels: An Example of Alienation

“…The state of existence in which the Houyhnhnms are depicted in Gulliver's Travels do not appear to imply a future state of mankind which symbolizes the embodiment of Swift's eschatological expectations either. On the contrary, According to Ehrenpreis (1957), Swift inserted into his narrative the Houyhnhnmland and their inhabitants as representatives of the belief in "the adequacy of reason without Christianity" (p. 898). For Swift, the tendency of the Houyhnhnms to grow to a better state of existence rather resides in their recognition of the need to benefit from "the time-approved wisdom of the race" (p. 50).…”

The Genealogy of an Image, or, What Does Literature (Not) Have To Do with the History of Computing? : Tracing the Sources and Reception of Gulliver’s “Knowledge Engine”

“…While all print satire relies on the tensions existing between ideas and their material presentation, Swift's entire project in the work entitled Travels into Several Remote Nations by Lemuel Gulliver originated in part as a satire of "the book" as material and socio-economic phenomenon. A novel that is in its entirety "regulated by an inclusive fiction of the text" (Castle 1993, p. 59), Gulliver's Travels is also dedicated, particularly in the third part, to satirizing a number of scientific inventions and the roles of printers and the press in verifying and securing ownership of them (Nicolson and Mohler 1937a;Lund 1983;Lynall 2012;Smith 1990;Kiernan 1971;Ehrenpreis 1957Ehrenpreis , 1989. In fact, in the scene in which the details of the "wonderful machine" are recorded, Gulliver functions both as draughtsman and publisher promising to not only document the invention accurately but to secure the professor's ownership of it should he ever have the opportunity to share his graphic description with others.…”