Gulliver’s Travels in Lilliput: A Satirical and Political Allegory

Posted on Aug 27, 2024 in History

Lilliput

Throughout Gulliver’s Travels, there is a constant dialectical relationship between what Gulliver encounters on his journeys and the history, politics, and society of England. Gulliver’s plain imagination balances the credible and the incredible. When we encounter the unbelievable, it is made believable by the ordinariness of Gulliver.

Lilliput and Gulliver

  • Swift’s basic technique is to ground the opening of each of the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels in the solidity of the real geographical, social, and historical world.
  • Gulliver appears in the setting of late-seventeenth-century commercial London.
  • When he departs, he provides nautical details of latitudes, lands, ship, and crew.
  • The tone is dispassionate, even when shipwreck occurs; Gulliver shows a mariner’s discipline in keeping a grasp on facts: He is not interested in telling us his sentiments, but facts that we can believe.
  • Precision of space and time is observed, creating credibility and authority.
  • Within a page, the exhausted Gulliver is captured by a nation of little people no more than fifteen centimeters high.
  • The prisoner’s attitude hardly changes at all: Though he felt the pain from the arrows, his tone remains dispassionate and descriptive, not dramatic and emotional. Swift bases fantasy on the reality of comparison: the link between the real and fantastic, London and Lilliput, is always implicit.
  • The naturalness of the simile gives the reader imaginative confidence in Gulliver’s account.
  • At the end of the first voyage, Gulliver returns home with some of the Lilliput livestock that have survived.
  • Here, anticipating the second voyage, proportions are inverted: Greenwich and a trim bowling green are real; miniaturized cattle are fantasy.
  • And when Gulliver captures the Blefuscu fleet and pulls it across the channel, do we allow our engagement with the text to be disturbed by its impossibility?
  • The Blefuscu ships are 2.7 meters long, and Gulliver “with great Ease drew fifty of the Enemy’s largest Men of War.”
  • When first captured by the Lilliputians, Gulliver admits being tempted.
  • Given the proportions, he could have held only two or three in each hand.
  • Thus, Swift’s strategy consists in providing sufficient detail for the imagination to work, and just enough to subvert that engagement.

2 Lilliput and Political Allegory

  • Chapters III and IV of the voyage to Lilliput contain some of the most notorious satire against English political leadership.
  • In chapter III, Gulliver describes the game of rope dancing.
  • Sometimes ministers are expected to show that they have retained their skills, and Gulliver’s enemy, Treasurer Flimnap…
  • This satirical image of a royal favorite and first minister was interpreted by contemporary readers as an allusion to Robert Walpole, who was the Whig prime minister of both George I and George II between 1721 and 1742.
  • Swift championed frontal opposition against Walpole’s policies on religious, political, economic, and Irish issues.
  • In chapter IV, Gulliver’s friend Reldresal, the Principal Secretary of Private Affairs, outlines the contemporary political situation
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  • Two political parties dominate, the Tramecksan and Slamecksan, named respectively after the high and low heels of their footwear.
  • The Low Heels are favored by the Emperor and occupy all positions of administration and government.
  • The other source of contention is Blefuscu, with which Lilliput has been engaged in hostilities for generations.
  • Division derives from the Lilliputian custom of breaking their eggs at the smaller end, while the Blefuscans insist on the ancient practice of breaking eggs at the larger end.
  • The present Emperor of Lilliput’s grandfather cut his finger while conventionally breaking an egg at the big end, whereupon the Emperor’s father issued an edict commanding the reverse practice.
  • From then on arose an internal division between Big-Endians and Little-Endians.
  • There is general acceptance that Swift is engaged in political allegory here: High and Low Heel parties refer to the Tories and Whigs. Parallel to these political affinities are Tory patronage of High Church (established Anglicanism) and the Whig party’s association with the Low Church (nonconformity, i.e., referring to Protestants separated from the Church of England).
  • The satire of the Little- and Big-Endians is thought to refer to Reformation controversy regarding the administration of the bread and wine at the Eucharist.
  • Many details of the Lilliputian utopia derive from Thomas More (I.vi.52-55):
  • In Lilliput, victims of false accusation are not doubly punished by legal costs but fully compensated.
  • Ethics are considered more seriously than material crime.
  • Laws reward the good as well as punish the bad.
  • Moral qualification for office takes precedence over intellectual competence.
  • Idleness, luxury, and corruption are forestalled by a utilitarian education.