Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726 as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, and it was written by Jonathan Swift, an Anglo-Irish clergyman and political writer. The book was an immediate success and was read as both travel fiction and satire from the start, which is the double life it has led ever since: the first two voyages became children's stories and the last two remained a political attack on the English, the Irish, the court, the academics and humanity in general.

The four parts are different books. Lilliput is a satire of small politics conducted by small people; Brobdingnag turns the proportions around so that Gulliver becomes the amusing object; Laputa and the academy chapters contain Swift's attacks on projectors and abstract learning; and the country of the Houyhnhnms is where the misanthropy becomes explicit. Swift's style throughout is deliberately plain, borrowed from ships' logs and travel accounts, which is what makes the absurdity land.

The novel has been adapted, abridged and illustrated down to a children's book in the centuries since, and most readers meet the first voyage long before the fourth. The full text is a political pamphlet with a story attached, and it belongs with the earliest English novels and with the satires that were being written alongside them. It is a standalone, and the original title page, with its invented narrator and its publisher's note, is part of the joke.