Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels, as it is familiarly known, was published anonymously in 1726, under the title
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Swift was by this time a bitter exile from England, uncomfortable in his role as Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, and strongly opposed to the government of Sir Robert Walpole, whose efforts to impose an underfunded copper coinage on Ireland Swift had fiercely and successfully resisted in a series of recent pamphlets.
Gulliver’s Travelswas, as Swift realised, an even more dangerous satire and its publication was deliberately surreptitious; the bookseller appears to have taken his own precautions, and interfered with the first published text. As well as political (and moral) targets, the book is in part a parody of the…
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Citation: Baines, Paul. "Gulliver's Travels". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 August 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4822, accessed 23 November 2024.]