Gulliver is not quite right in the head: “I feared my brain was disturbed by my sufferings and misfortunes” (p. 230). The only real question here is when one can mark the onset of symptoms. Many odd moments in the text encourage a reader to wonder about the status of the Travels as paranoid fantasy. For example, why would Gulliver, who so readily names the places he visits, lapse at one point in the third voyage and speak of other lands not recorded in his story. He seems to know places that are literally jumbled in his head, one of which he mentions on the voyage to Laputa, a place named “Tribnia, by the natives called Langden” (p. 194). The anagram is obviously “Britain, by the natives called England.” Could it be that a disturbed Gulliver is homebound wherever he is?

By casting doubt on Gulliver’s sanity at the beginning of the Travels, Swift could address two issues that plagued the reception of the original edition. The first was the notion that readers actually believed the adventures to be real. Swift was particularly astonished when his friends wrote to him in Ireland, where he lived in self-imposed exile, and told him that there were reports of mariners in England who claimed to have sailed with Captain Gulliver on his most remarkable adventures. Second, although Swift never placed his own name anywhere on the pages of Gulliver’s Travels, he expressed considerable irritation with readers who assumed that Gulliver’s final views on humankind and on European civilization were identical in every respect to his own.

Swift’s satiric vision was far more complex than Gulliver’s naive, ill-spirited, and irrational blustering. And an obviously mad narrator would offer Swift a kind of satiric cover. Mad or lunatic narrators appear in virtually all his important works, even his famous A Modest Proposal, in which a strangely obsessed economic writer proposes to make a stew from the bulk of Ireland’s infant population for a better national balance of trade. Early in his career, in A Tale of a Tub, Swift defined madness as a kind of imaginative self-conspiracy:

When a Man’s Fancy gets astride on his Reason, when Imagination is at cuffs with the Senses, and common Understanding, as well as common Sense, is Kickt out of Doors; the first Proselyte he makes, is Himself, and when that is once compass‘d, the Difficulty is not so great in bringing over others (A Tale of a Tub, p. 171; see “For Further Reading”).

First-time and even repeat readers of Gulliver’s Travels would do well to keep this passage in mind. Perhaps it is not Gulliver’s adventures that have driven him mad, but a mad Gulliver who has conjured up a sequence of adventures—all the little people, giants, flying islands, and talking horses that constitute what in a demented sense are truly Gulliver’s Travels.

The Writing of Gulliver’s Travels

When pressed to write up his own account of his travels by the captain who rescued him from Brobdingnag, Lemuel Gulliver says, “I thought we were already overstocked with books of travels: that nothing could now pass which was not extraordinary” (p. 151). Gulliver has an odd sense of his experiences if he thinks they would pass for anything but extraordinary, and extraordinary they certainly are. Gulliver’s Travels was a phenomenal success upon its publication in October 1726, read as eagerly and voraciously by all classes of English society as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe had been a few years before, in 1719. The poet and dramatist John Gay wrote Swift about the reception of the Travels in London: “From the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the cabinet-council to the nursery” (October 28, 1726). Within a year of its publication, editions of Gulliver’s Travels were pirated and translated on the European continent. Its famous episodes and its nomenclature—Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Yahoos—are to this day recognized all over the world, from Gulliver theme parks in Japan to the most up-to-date dictionaries of modern slang.

How did Gulliver’s Travels get written and what were Jonathan Swift’s motives in writing it? In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Swift shared certain obsessions with others, namely a group of writers, statesmen, and professionals who called themselves the Scriblerus Club, consisting of the poets Alexander Pope, Thomas Parnell, and John Gay, the Queen’s physician, John Arbuth not, and the chief minister of state, Robert Harley. Under the general direction of Pope, one of the club’s primary projects was a volume of memoirs written purportedly by the invented character who gave the club its name, Martin Scriblerus, a modern hack-writer or scribbler (the terms were interchangeable) who embodied all the cultural, intellectual, and political vacuities of the early eighteenth century as Pope, Swift, and their friends saw them.

In 1713 Pope assigned Swift the sixteenth chapter of a proposed satiric memoir on Scriblerus’s various journeys, intending to capitalize on the immensely popular genre of travel writing. He encouraged Swift to detail Martin’s travels to four different lands, mapping voyages to distant continents along the sea-lanes of known and unknown worlds: “to the Remains of the Pygmaean Empire,” to “the Land of the Giants,” to the “Kingdom of Philosophers, who govern by the Mathematicks,” and to a land in which “he discovers a Vein of Melancholy proceeding almost to a Disgust of his Species” (Pope, The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, p. 165).

Pope must have sensed he had assigned Swift what amounted to a labor of love in parodying the travel literature of the time because, as is often true for satirists, Swift thrilled at making fun of those things that he found appalling. And there is little doubt Swift found appalling the sorry lot of characters Gulliver describes in the Travels as crisscrossing the world: “fellows of desperate fortunes,” some of whom “were undone by lawsuits; others spent all they had in drinking, whoring, and gaming; others fled for treason; many for murder, theft, poisoning, robbery, perjury, forgery, coining false money; for committing rapes or sodomy; for flying from their colours, or deserting to the enemy; and most of them had broken prison” (p. 244). Memoirs by these sorts and their more sanitized brethren filled Swift’s personal library, which, in lots cataloged at his death, contained more than 600 travel accounts.

When Swift began the assignment given him by Pope, he sketched out some material for what would become the first and third books of the Travels, the Lilliputian and Laputian voyages. But he shelved the rest of the assignment before the end of 1713 at a time when the high-ranking political ministers for whom he worked in England fell out of power. Swift felt it prudent to abscond to Ireland, and although he held the position of Dean of St.