Gulliver’s Travels: Satirical Signals and Literary Allusions
BOOK I: Gulliver’s Biographical Account
- In contrast to the book’s preliminary pages, chapter 1 begins with a factual, biographical account of Gulliver where Swift combines plain description with satirical allusion.
- Gulliver is a non-inheriting, middle son of lesser Puritan gentry who had moved from Banbury to a known area of Puritan faction in Nottinghamshire.
- Gulliver was unable to remain at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, because of his father’s economic situation.
- Gulliver turns from humanist studies at Cambridge and takes up apprenticeship with a surgeon.
- Going from humanism to the “mechanick” arts of navigation and mathematics, Gulliver has utilitarian foresight in planning his career as a seaman.
- This is furthered by a long period studying “Physick” at Leyden, to prepare himself as ship’s surgeon.
- As a dissenter, Gulliver would not have been allowed to study at the Royal College of Physicians.
- Leiden University was a Reformation foundation in a country that had always given refuge to English Puritan exiles.
- What Gulliver presents as a set of neutral facts, Swift knows will have far from neutral resonances.
- After initial voyages, Gulliver returns to London and sets up in practice as a physician and marries a daughter of a hosier from Newgate Street.
- These last details are often taken as a satirical attack on Daniel Defoe, since Defoe was originally a hosier and married an heiress imprisoned in Newgate after he spent her dowry.
- It has been argued that Swift deliberately made Gulliver the middle son from the middle of England, with a middle-class father, having a middle-class religion and receiving a middle-class education.
- To maintain this view involves a blurring of social, geographical, and educational allusions.
Conclusion: Gulliver’s Modern Values
Gulliver comes from lesser Puritan gentry down on their fortunes and has to turn from the pursuits of a leisured professional gentleman to the urban, mercantile, utilitarian world. In the opening satirical frame and thereafter, Gulliver embodies the values, ideas, and activities of “modernism”: self-reliance, practicality, and profit.
The Names: Lemuel and Gulliver
Lemuel: A Rare Biblical Name
A rare forename outside of Gulliver’s Travels. It appears mentioned twice in the Old Testament. Lemuel is Hebrew for “consecrated to God.” Who would choose this very rare name? As God’s chosen people, the Puritans went to the Old Testament to name their children after the ancient Israelites: The more obscure the name, the greater their testament to familiarity with the Bible.
Gulliver: A Name of Deception
It is an English surname, but it also carries satirical connotations: Gulliver is gullible, and some gullible readers believed that Gulliver’s Travels was a real account. Though the etymology is obscure, since the sixteenth century the noun gull has meant “a dupe,” while the verb to gull means “to cheat.” The final syllable “ver” might suggest veracity or truth. Gulliver is “the dupe of truth”.
Satirical Signals in the Text
- As the contemporary reader opened the first pages, he encountered specific social and literary signals that pointed to satire.
- Picking up the Latin inscription, the educated reader would be predisposed to expect satire, whereas the uneducated reader would assume that here was another account of travels.
- At the opening “Letter” Gulliver claims to have advised the most famous English explorer, William Dampier, to correct his A New Voyage round the World (1697).
- The “Letter” closes with the misanthropic Gulliver rejecting his family, the Yahoos, and “visionary Schemes,” retreating to his stable to confer with his “degenerate” Houyhnhnms.
- As the reader turned to the first page of GT, he encountered the map containing inaccuracies: the factual “Dimens Land” (Van Dieman’s Land) and Sumatra appear.
- From the beginning, all the information given suggests satire, but only the educated monitory would be able to interpret those pointers: people in power might interpret an innuendo.
Lilliput: Cartographic Reality and Satire
- The islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu are rendered with cartographic reality.
- But up the coast of Sumatra are “I Good Fortune,” namely, the Isles of Good Fortune or the Fortunate Islands, traditionally associated with the Canary Islands.
- Evidently the map parallels the frontispiece with its give-away inscription.