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You may have heard folks call Gulliver's Travels that a satire. A satire is a (generally humorous) fictional work which uses sarcasm and irony to poke fun in the general patheticness of humankind -- our weakness, our stupidity, all that jazz. But if you love twenty-first century satire (like we do), you need to check out the eighteenth century -- these men were huge supporters of a fantastic satire.

In actuality, a number of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, such as poet Alexander Pope, mathematician John Arbuthnot, and our main guy, Jonathan Swift, couldn't get sufficient satire. They even started a club, the Scriblerus Club, to express their overall contempt for mankind and for bad writing in particular.

Therefore, we think that it's fair to state that the early eighteenth century was a great time to get haters. This was blessed for Jonathan Swift, because he is just like the king of haters -- one of the greatest authors of satire which English literature has ever seen.

Actually, Swift had a great deal of reason to hate folks, because he had a somewhat disastrous public existence. Swift was an Irish clergyman who frequently came to London to participate in the literary and political scene beneath Queen Anne.

Tories favored royal jurisdiction and the national church (Anglicanism). Swift might not have believed as strongly from the divine right of kings as a few dyed-in-the-wool Tories (as you could suspect from his satire of championships at Gulliver's Travels). However, he did normally side with political conservatives on the topics of the day.

With George arrived a strongly pro-Whig Parliament. The Whigs were the political opponents of the Tories, and Swift discovered himself up a creek without a paddle. Towards the end of the political existence, Swift headed back to Ireland, becoming dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. This feud between the Whigs and the Tories supplies the principal governmental material for Gulliver's Travels -- for further details, check out our "Character Analysis" of the Lilliputians.

Swift finished Gulliver's Travels at 1725 and printed it via London printer Benjamin Motte at 1726. Motte was so concerned with being charged with treason for publishing Gulliver's Travelsthat he attempted to tone down the political content of many parts of the novel (origin). The simple fact that Swift could not even use his own name when planning his own book's publication, which the writer attempted to censor its content, gives us a feeling of exactly how offensive Gulliver's Travels should have been when it was composed.

Outraged which Motte rearranged his first text, Swift eventually sent Gulliver's Travels to another media for printing. The 1735 edition, printed by George Faulkner at Dublin, restores the novel in its whole shape and contains a nasty little letter allegedly from "Captain Gulliver" criticizing the 1726 edition's changes. But even Motte acquired a happy conclusion: Gulliver's Travelssold out its initial printing in 10 days. Everyone read it, and now here we're, ready to get to the nitty gritty of Lemuel Gulliver and his journeys.

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