Three hundred years after Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was first published in 1726, it is easy to assume that a book about tiny people, giants and imaginary countries belongs firmly in the past. Yet Swift’s strange, funny and often unsettling adventure remains remarkably relevant. Beneath the fantasy is a sharp examination of human behaviour - and that is something that never goes out of date.
At first, Gulliver’s Travels seems like an exciting travel story. Lemuel Gulliver is shipwrecked and discovers the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput, later encounters giants in Brobdingnag and eventually meets the Houyhnhnms, intelligent horses who live according to reason. But Swift uses these journeys to make us look at our own world from unfamiliar angles.
The Lilliputians, for example, are tiny in physical size but enormous in their arguments, ambitions and pride. Gulliver describes how political candidates compete for power by performing tricks on a tightrope: the person who “dances best” is rewarded with office. It is an absurd image, but Swift is making a serious point about the way people can pursue power through performance rather than ability.
Swift also turns our assumptions about what makes someone important upside down. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver—who seemed enormous in Lilliput—becomes tiny himself. The King of Brobdingnag listens to Gulliver proudly describe European civilisation before responding that its people seem to be “the most pernicious Race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.” The insult is deliberately shocking, but it forces Gulliver, and us, to question whether technological progress and political sophistication necessarily make humanity admirable.
The book becomes darker still when Gulliver encounters the Houyhnhnms. Their rational society exposes the greed, violence and irrationality of human beings. By the end, Gulliver has become so disillusioned that he struggles to tolerate his fellow humans. Swift leaves us wondering whether seeing the flaws of humanity clearly can itself become a flaw.
That is why Gulliver’s Travels remains such a rewarding read three centuries later. Swift does not simply tell us what to think. Instead, he makes the familiar look strange. Tiny people, enormous people and talking horses become mirrors in which we recognise ourselves.
The language may sometimes feel old-fashioned, but the questions are surprisingly modern: Why do people fight over power? What makes a society successful? Are humans really as rational and civilised as we imagine?
Three hundred years on, Gulliver’s journeys still invite us to laugh at ourselves -and then think twice about what we are laughing at.