Gulliver's Travels

Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon with terrible luck, makes four voyages and returns from each a little less able to live with his own species. In Lilliput he is a giant among six inch politicians who wage war over which end of an egg to crack. In Brobdingnag the scale reverses, and a giant king listens to Gulliver's proud account of European civilisation before concluding that his countrymen sound like odious vermin. The third voyage tours Laputa and its neighbours, where scientists work at extracting sunbeams from cucumbers while their houses fall down. The last voyage lands him among the Houyhnhnms, rational horses whose island's other species, the filthy Yahoos, are unmistakably human, and Gulliver comes home so estranged from his own kind that even the kindness of Don Pedro de Mendez, the generous Portuguese captain who carries him back, cannot reconcile him to it; he ends the book preferring the company of his stable.

Readers who know it only as a children's story about tiny people are in for a shock, and the shock is the point. This is the fiercest sustained satire in English, and it deepens voyage by voyage from political comedy to a real question about whether human beings deserve the account they give of themselves. Swift's plain, deadpan travel narrator style is what makes it work: the more monstrous the matter, the calmer the sentence.

It was published anonymously in October 1726 and succeeded instantly; the poet John Gay reported it being read from the cabinet council to the nursery. Its publisher softened politically dangerous passages, and the fuller text had to wait for the Dublin edition of 1735.