Gulliver's Travels
Cast away on four voyages, a ship’s surgeon meets six-inch courtiers, giants, head-in-the-clouds mathematicians and reasoning horses, and comes home unable to stand the sight of his own kind.
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Lemuel Gulliver tells his travels in the flat, careful voice of a man who wants you to trust his measurements. In Lilliput he is a giant among six-inch courtiers whose quarrel over which end of an egg to break has led to war. In Brobdingnag he is a toy, and a wise giant king hears his proud account of England and calls its people vermin. A flying island of mathematicians and a land ruled by rational horses finish the job, and Gulliver comes home unable to bear his own wife. Swift’s satire of politics, science and pride is still funny, and its last turn still starts arguments.
What happens in Gulliver's Travels
The book opens with a note from Gulliver’s cousin Richard Sympson, who says he cut the sea details, and a letter dated 1727 in which Gulliver complains that his book was altered and has reformed nobody. Lemuel Gulliver, a Nottinghamshire surgeon, sails on the Antelope in 1699 and is wrecked near Van Diemen’s Land. He wakes tied to the ground by the Lilliputians, people under six inches high. The Emperor keeps him chained, then frees him on conditions. Lilliput is split between High-Heels and Low-Heels and is at war with Blefuscu, which shelters the Big-Endians, exiles who insist on breaking eggs at the larger end. Gulliver wades across the channel and tows away the enemy fleet, but refuses to help conquer Blefuscu, and later puts out a palace fire by urinating on it. His enemies draw up articles of treason, and when he learns he is to lose his eyes he escapes to Blefuscu, finds a boat and reaches England in 1702. On his second voyage he is left behind in Brobdingnag, a land of giants. A farmer shows him for money until the Queen buys him, and the farmer’s daughter Glumdalclitch becomes his nurse at court. After Gulliver praises England at length, the King concludes that most of its people are odious vermin, and he is horrified when Gulliver offers him gunpowder. An eagle carries off Gulliver’s travelling box and drops it in the sea, where an English ship picks him up. On his third voyage pirates set him adrift, and the flying island of Laputa hauls him up. Its mathematicians are so lost in thought that servants must flap them before they can speak or listen. Below, in Lagado, he tours the Academy of Projectors, whose schemes have ruined the country. He calls up the dead on Glubbdubdrib, meets the miserable immortal Struldbrugs in Luggnagg, and gets home by way of Japan and Amsterdam. On the fourth voyage his crew mutinies and maroons him in the land of the Houyhnhnms, rational horses who keep filthy human-shaped Yahoos as beasts. Gulliver comes to revere his master and loathe humankind, but the Houyhnhnms’ assembly decides he must go. He builds a canoe, is taken aboard by a kind Portuguese captain, Pedro de Mendez, and returns to a family whose smell he cannot bear.
Where and when Gulliver's Travels happens
Lilliput and Brobdingnag
The first two voyages turn on one change of scale. In Lilliput people are under six inches tall and Gulliver is twelve times their height; in Brobdingnag the corn stands forty feet high and a girl of nine is about forty feet tall, so Gulliver becomes the plaything.
Laputa and Balnibarbi
Laputa is a round island about four and a half miles across, raised, lowered and steered by a giant loadstone above the King’s lands. Below it lies Balnibarbi, whose capital, Lagado, is about half the size of London and falling to ruin under the projectors’ schemes.
The country of the Houyhnhnms
A land of grass and oat fields where horses live in low wattled houses, with no iron, no letters and no word for lying. The Yahoos are kept in kennels and fields to dig, haul and draw sledges, and Gulliver comes to think of it as the one place he was happy.
1699 to 1715
Gulliver’s voyages run from May 1699 to December 1715, through the reign of the Queen he mentions in Part IV, and he writes five years after his last return. His dates and latitudes place the imaginary lands in real seas near Van Diemen’s Land, Japan and New Holland.
Chapter by chapter summary + why it matters
- 1
The Prefatory Letters and Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
Richard Sympson introduces his cousin’s papers, and in a letter dated April 2, 1727, Gulliver scolds him for changing the text and complains that the Yahoos of England are no better six months after publication. The voyage proper begins with Gulliver’s wreck in 1699 and his capture by the Lilliputians, who inventory his pockets, take his scimitar and pistols, and free him on articles drawn up by his enemy Skyresh Bolgolam. The Secretary Reldresal explains the feud between High-Heels and Low-Heels and the egg quarrel behind the war with Blefuscu; Gulliver captures the Blefuscudian fleet, is made a Nardac, refuses to enslave Blefuscu, and douses the Empress’s burning apartment with urine. Warned that the council has sentenced him to lose his eyes, he flees to Blefuscu, finds a real boat, and reaches the Downs in April 1702.
Why it mattersLilliput reads as Swift’s England made tiny, with offices won by rope-dancing, parties known by their heels and a religious war over eggs, usually matched with Tories and Whigs, Catholics and Protestants, and England against France. The text names only the Big-Endians; their opponents are simply those who break the smaller end, and the book never calls them Little-Endians.
- 2
Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
Left behind in 1703 when his shipmates flee a giant, Gulliver is found by a reaper and shown for money by the farmer who owns the field, while the farmer’s nine-year-old daughter Glumdalclitch nurses him and teaches him the language. The Queen buys him, and at court he survives the Queen’s dwarf, a shower of hail, a spaniel, wasps, a frog and a monkey that carries him onto a roof. Over five audiences he praises England to the King, who answers with pointed questions and a crushing verdict on its people, then refuses in horror Gulliver’s offer to teach him gunpowder. After about two years an eagle snatches his travelling box on the south coast and drops it in the sea, and Captain Thomas Wilcocks’s ship brings him home in 1706, where he stoops at the door and thinks his family tiny.
Why it mattersThe change of scale turns the satire around: now Gulliver is the small creature whose pride looks absurd, and the giants’ magnified skin and smells show him how he must have looked in Lilliput. The King’s plain wisdom, that anyone who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew serves his country better than all the politicians, sets a standard Gulliver never sees he has failed.
- 3
Part III: Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan
Set adrift by pirates, Gulliver is hauled up to Laputa, a flying island of mathematicians and musicians so lost in thought that servants must flap them before they speak or listen, whose King controls the land below by blocking its sun and rain, pelting it with stones, or threatening to drop the island on it. On the continent of Balnibarbi, Lord Munodi shows him a country ruined by the Academy of Projectors in Lagado, where professors extract sunbeams from cucumbers, build houses from the roof down and write books with a word-turning frame. On Glubbdubdrib he summons the dead and finds modern history full of lies, and on Luggnagg he learns that the Struldbrugs, born never to die, simply grow older forever, losing teeth, memory and language. He passes through Japan posing as a Dutch merchant and is home in April 1710.
Why it mattersLaputa and the Academy mock theory cut off from use, and readers usually connect the projectors with the experiments of the Royal Society, whose early home, Gresham College, Gulliver mentions in Part II. This edition also prints the Lindalino episode in Chapter III, in which a rebel city fights the flying island with loadstones; it appears in no edition printed in Swift’s lifetime, so a reader comparing editions may not find it, and it is often read as a picture of Irish resistance to English power.
- 4
Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
Marooned by his mutinous crew in 1711, Gulliver is attacked by the Yahoos, filthy human-shaped beasts, and taken home by a dapple-gray Houyhnhnm, one of the rational horses who rule the land. As he learns their language he describes Europe’s wars, lawyers, doctors, money and ministers, and his master concludes that humans are Yahoos with just enough reason to make their vices worse. Gulliver resolves never to return to humankind, but the Houyhnhnms’ general assembly urges his master to work him like other Yahoos or send him away, and he sails off in a canoe covered with Yahoo skins. The Portuguese captain Pedro de Mendez carries him to Lisbon, and back in England in 1715 he faints at his wife’s kiss, spends hours a day talking with two horses, and ends by denouncing human pride.
Why it mattersCritics still argue whether the Houyhnhnms are Swift’s ideal or a cold one, and whether Gulliver’s contempt for his family is Swift’s message or the last joke at Gulliver’s expense. Don Pedro, a human who behaves better than Gulliver does, is often cited as evidence that the ending does not simply endorse him.
Characters and how they connect
Lemuel Gulliver
Narrator and traveller
A Nottinghamshire surgeon who studied at Emanuel College, Cambridge, and at Leyden before going to sea. He is observant, proud of his country and easily flattered, and after four voyages he returns from the Houyhnhnms despising humankind and preferring the company of horses.
The Emperor of Lilliput
Ruler of Lilliput
A stately monarch taller than his courtiers by about the breadth of Gulliver’s nail. He frees Gulliver and makes him a Nardac, but never forgives his refusal to conquer Blefuscu, and his court praises his mercy while sentencing Gulliver to lose his eyes.
Reldresal
Principal Secretary for private Affairs
Gulliver’s friend at the Lilliputian court, who explains the heel parties and the egg war. In council his plea for mercy means putting out Gulliver’s eyes instead of killing him, and he adds a plan to starve him slowly to save money.
Skyresh Bolgolam
High-Admiral of Lilliput
The morose and sour Admiral, or Galbet, who is Gulliver’s mortal enemy from the start and draws up the terms of his release. Gulliver’s capture of the enemy fleet outshines him, and he insists on death when the council tries Gulliver for treason.
Glumdalclitch
Gulliver’s little nurse
The Brobdingnagian farmer’s daughter, nine years old and not above forty feet tall, who names Gulliver Grildrig, sews his shirts and teaches him the language. She follows him to court, and she is ill and in tears when he is carried to the shore on the day he is lost.
The King of Brobdingnag
Ruler of the giants
A grave, learned prince who first takes Gulliver for a piece of clockwork. After questioning him closely about England he calls most of its people odious vermin, and he would rather lose half his kingdom than learn the secret of gunpowder.
The master Houyhnhnm
Gulliver’s master
A dapple-gray horse of rank who takes Gulliver in, teaches him the language and questions him about Europe with growing disgust. He keeps Gulliver as long as the assembly allows, borrows Gulliver’s own idea of gelding for the Yahoos, and at parting raises his hoof to Gulliver’s mouth.
Pedro de Mendez
Portuguese sea captain
The courteous captain whose sailors seize Gulliver on the coast of New Holland. He feeds him, has him chained when he tries to leap overboard, houses him in Lisbon, lends him twenty pounds and persuades him to go home, and Gulliver can barely tolerate him.
Character Relationships who connects to whom, and the themes that bind them
Family
Rivalry / conflict
Surveillance / society
Friendship / ally
Connection
Themes in Gulliver's Travels what the novel is really about
Size and point of view
Gulliver towers over the Lilliputians and cowers before the Brobdingnagians, and each change shows what the other hid. He finds giant skin coarse and ugly, then remembers a Lilliputian telling him the same about his own face. Swift uses scale to ask whether human greatness is anything more than a matter of where one stands.
Power, party and empire
The Lilliputian court rewards rope-dancers and punishes service, and its Emperor turns on Gulliver for refusing to enslave a free people. The King of Brobdingnag hears Gulliver’s history of England as a heap of conspiracies, rebellions and massacres. In the last chapter Gulliver describes how pirates found a colony by divine right, then adds a paragraph of praise for British colonies that most readers take as irony.
Knowledge without use
The Laputians build houses without a single right angle, and Lagado’s projectors have beggared their country with schemes that never work. Against them stand Lord Munodi’s old-fashioned, fertile estate and the Brobdingnagians, whose mathematics serves farming and the mechanical arts. Swift mocks theory cut off from ordinary life, though readers argue over how far he meant to mock the new science itself.
Reason and the human animal
The Houyhnhnms live wholly by reason and the Yahoos wholly by appetite, and Gulliver, who resembles a Yahoo in every limb, has to ask which he is. His master decides that humans have a small pittance of reason and use it to make their vices worse. Whether Swift agrees, or whether the horses’ cool rationality is itself being questioned, is the central argument about the book.
Truth, lies and travellers’ tales
The Houyhnhnms have no word for lying and call it saying the thing which was not. Gulliver insists on his own truthfulness from the opening letter to the last chapter, while the book around him is plainly invented and parodies real travel writing with its dates, latitudes and sea jargon. The joke asks how far to trust any traveller, or any narrator.
Symbols & motifs
The eggs
Lilliput’s law that eggs be broken at the smaller end, and the six rebellions fought over it, stand for bitter quarrels over things that make no difference. The scripture both sides appeal to says only that true believers should break their eggs at the convenient end.
The flying island
Laputa floats above the land it rules and can shut off its sun and rain or crush it from above. It stands for power and theory that have lost touch with the ground, and in the Lindalino episode the people below find a way to fight back.
The looking-glass
In Brobdingnag the Queen holds Gulliver up to a mirror beside her and he feels ridiculous; in the land of the Houyhnhnms he turns away from his own reflection in a lake. At the end he plans to look at himself often in a glass, hoping to get used to the sight of a human being.
The Yahoos
Human in shape, filthy, greedy and fond of shining stones they hoard, the Yahoos picture humanity without its clothes, manners and excuses. The Houyhnhnms add the word Yahoo to anything bad, and Gulliver ends up using it for his own family.
Recurring motifs
Measuring and counting. Gulliver measures everything: a daily allowance for 1728 Lilliputians, a rat’s tail two yards long wanting an inch, a flying island 7837 yards across. The exact numbers make the fantasy sound like a ship’s log.
The body up close. Urine puts out a palace fire, a giant nurse’s breast disgusts Gulliver, and the Yahoos greet him by fouling him from a tree. Swift keeps pulling readers down to bodies and smells, the physical facts that human pride tries to forget.
Learning languages. Gulliver picks up every language quickly, from Lilliputian to Houyhnhnm, and each one reveals its speakers. The Laputians praise a woman’s beauty in the terms of geometry, and the Houyhnhnms have no words for power, war, law or lying.
Important quotes
“That all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end”
“Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
“I grew heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I had formed, and thought no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure from such a life.”
“I turned away my face in horror and detestation of myself, and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo, than of my own person.”
“Hnuy illa nyha majah Yahoo, Take care of thyself, gentle Yahoo.”
The ending of Gulliver's Travels, explained
Gulliver’s last voyage ends in an exile he did not choose. The Houyhnhnms’ assembly, uneasy that his master treats a Yahoo almost as an equal, urges that he be put to work like the others or sent away, and Gulliver faints at the news. He builds a canoe covered with Yahoo skins, kisses his master’s hoof, and hopes to find an empty island rather than live among humans again. Portuguese sailors take him instead, and the patient captain Pedro de Mendez brings him to Lisbon and talks him into going home. Back in England he faints when his wife kisses him, cannot bear his family near him for a year, and talks to two horses for at least four hours a day. In the last chapter he has just begun letting his wife eat at the far end of a long table, keeps his nose stopped with rue, lavender or tobacco, and says he can put up with lawyers and pickpockets but not with a creature full of vices who is also proud. Readers split over what this means. Some take Gulliver’s disgust as Swift’s own verdict: the Houyhnhnms show what reason could be, and the Yahoos show what people are underneath. They point to a 1725 letter in which Swift told Alexander Pope that he wrote to vex the world rather than divert it. Others, sometimes called the soft school against the hard school, argue that Gulliver has become a fool trying to be a horse, and that the Houyhnhnms, who feel no grief at death and debate exterminating the Yahoos, are too cold to be an ideal. Don Pedro, a kind human Gulliver can hardly look at, is their best evidence. The ending may be both at once: a real attack on human pride that also mocks the man who thinks he has escaped it.
Common misreadings
MythGulliver’s Travels is about Gulliver among the tiny people and the giants.
ActuallyThose are Parts I and II. The book has four voyages, and the last two, to the flying island of Laputa and to the land of the Houyhnhnms, carry much of its sharpest satire, including the ending most essays are about.
MythThe Academy of Lagado is on the flying island of Laputa.
ActuallyLaputa is the flying island of the King and his mathematicians. The Academy of Projectors is in Lagado, the capital of Balnibarbi on the ground below, founded after some of its people visited Laputa about forty years earlier.
MythGulliver speaks for Swift, so the ending is simply Swift saying humans are Yahoos.
ActuallyGulliver is a character Swift often laughs at, from his offer of gunpowder to his daily talks with his horses. Readers still argue how much of Gulliver’s final hatred of humankind Swift shares, and the kind Portuguese captain complicates any simple reading.
Test yourself
1. What began the quarrel behind Lilliput’s war with Blefuscu?
The present Emperor’s grandfather cut his finger breaking an egg at the larger end, so his father ordered all subjects to break the smaller end. Big-Endian exiles fled to Blefuscu, whose emperors stirred up rebellions and then war. The heels are a separate, domestic quarrel.
2. What does the King of Brobdingnag do when Gulliver offers to teach him to make gunpowder?
In Part II, Chapter VII the King is struck with horror and says he would rather lose half his kingdom than know such a secret. Gulliver blames the refusal on the King’s narrow principles.
3. What does the name Glumdalclitch mean, according to Gulliver?
Gulliver calls the farmer’s daughter his Glumdalclitch, or little nurse. She names him Grildrig, which he says means mannikin, and the capital’s name, Lorbrulgrud, means Pride of the Universe.
4. What makes the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg so wretched?
Gulliver first imagines immortality as endless youth and wisdom. He learns instead that Struldbrugs are declared dead in law at eighty, lose teeth and hair at ninety, and cannot talk with mortals after two hundred years because the language has changed.
5. How does Gulliver live after he returns from the Houyhnhnms?
He faints when his wife kisses him, cannot bear his family near him for the first year, and buys two young horses that he talks with at least four hours every day.
Flashcards flip, self-grade, and the deck remembers what you know
Nice work.
Lemuel Gulliver is a ship’s doctor who keeps getting stranded in strange lands. First he lands among tiny people no taller than your hand, whose rulers go to war over which end of an egg to crack. Then he reaches a land of giants, where he is the tiny one and a kind girl looks after him like a doll. Next he visits a floating island full of thinkers so lost in their ideas that servants have to tap them to get their attention. Last he finds a country where wise talking horses rule, and wild, dirty creatures that look like people are kept as animals. The horses make him so ashamed of people that back home he would rather talk to his horses than to his own family. Swift wrote it to make fun of the silly and cruel things people do.
Compare & connect the story universe
Candide
Another eighteenth-century satire in which a naive traveller crosses the world, visits a perfect country, and comes home with a smaller, stranger idea of how to live.
A Modest Proposal
Swift’s 1729 essay uses the same straight-faced method: a calm, reasonable speaker whose views the reader has to see past.
Animal Farm
Another political satire that uses talking animals to mirror real rulers and parties, and that asks readers to decode the allegory.
The Time Machine
Another traveller’s tale in which the narrator reports on two strange races, the Eloi and the Morlocks, that turn out to be a dark mirror of his own society.
Adaptations. Gulliver’s Travels (1939, Animated film by Fleischer Studios), Gulliver’s Travels (1996, Television miniseries), Gulliver’s Travels (2010, Film).
Discussion & essay prompts for class, or your next paper
💬 Discussion questions
- What is Jonathan Swift satirizing in Gulliver’s Travels
- What do the Big-Endians and the high and low heels represent in Gulliver’s Travels
- Who are the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels
- How does Gulliver's Travels explore the theme of size and point of view?
- How does Gulliver's Travels explore the theme of power, party and empire?
- What is the central conflict in Gulliver's Travels, and how does it shape the ending?
✎ Essay prompts
- Analyze how Jonathan Swift develops the theme of size and point of view in Gulliver's Travels. Support your argument with specific evidence from the text.
- Examine the significance of the eggs in Gulliver's Travels. What does it represent, and how does it deepen the work’s meaning?
- How does Jonathan Swift use naive narrator to shape the reader’s experience of Gulliver's Travels?
- Some readers assume that gulliver’s Travels is about Gulliver among the tiny people and the giants. Argue for or against this interpretation, using evidence from the text.
Key questions students ask
- What is Jonathan Swift satirizing in Gulliver’s Travels
- What do the Big-Endians and the high and low heels represent in Gulliver’s Travels
- Who are the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels
- Why does Gulliver hate humans at the end of Gulliver’s Travels
- What are the Struldbrugs in Gulliver’s Travels
- What is the Academy of Lagado satirizing in Gulliver’s Travels
Analysis is original StoryBites commentary. The text and the quotations follow Gulliver’s Travels as edited by G. Ravenscroft Dennis for volume VIII of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., edited by Temple Scott (London: George Bell and Sons, 1899), checked against the page images. Dennis prints the 1726 first and 1727 second editions as corrected from Charles Ford’s interleaved copy, which carries Swift’s own corrections, and he includes the Lindalino passage in Part III, Chapter III, which no edition printed in Swift’s lifetime contains. George Faulkner’s Dublin edition of 1735, which many scholars think Swift helped revise and which first printed Gulliver’s letter to Sympson, differs in places, and many modern editions follow it. It is in the public domain.