The Second Most Famous Swift

The *Gulliver's Travels* Reading Challenge, an Introduction

Jonathan Swift is a writer for our time as much as he was for his own—or even more so. As Victoria Glendinning writes in her excellent biography, in "his hatred of militarism, his concern for human rights, social justice and the natural world, his attitude to social welfare—he seems to have leapfrogged the Victorians and most of the twentieth century, and to stand as the moral true north not only for the millennium but for all time."¹

Some of his less attractive personal characteristics—his reflexive anger, his sense of grievance and ill-usage, his strident political partisanship, and his scatological fixation—also seem very familiar to us in 2024. He was a living contradiction—a man with a generous heart who treated some people very badly, a political conservative who believed the social order to be oppressive, an ordained minister of the Church of Ireland who viewed the history of Christianity as one long narrative of cruelty and hypocrisy, a misanthropist who loved people with a white-hot intensity, a misogynist who was devoted to a woman whom he thought superior to any man he knew.

Over the next few weeks, we will take a close look at this impossibly complex, endlessly fascinating writer, largely through his best-known work, Gulliver's Travels, as well as some of his poems and other shorter texts. We will begin later this week with the letter that opens all editions of the text after 1735, in which "Gulliver," who is Swift and is not Swift at the same time, launches an unhinged screed at his publisher, a torrent of insane vitriol, which will reveal to us much about Swift and his world. From that point we will back up and sketch a picture of Swift's life to that point; for more than most other writers, a knowledge of his life and world can enhance our understanding of his writing, timeless though it may be. Then we will take a long, slow walk through all four parts of Gulliver's Travels, supplemented by excursions into other writings.

I hope that you will join us as we explore the fantastical worlds created by this greatest of satirists. You may or may not like Swift, but I can promise that he is never boring.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Alina Kovalchuk on Unsplash

1. Victoria Glendinning, Jonathan Swift: A Portrait (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), page 15.