Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin—which seemed to him a booby prize for his larger ambitions—he considered himself a virtual exile in Ireland for the rest of his life.

The political situation soured for Swift to an even greater extent in the early 1720S. With his patrons dead, still out of power, or in exile, and with some of his friends under scrutiny for treason, he decided to reprise his notes for the Scriblerus project and convert them into a four-part book. He completed the first and third voyages and supplemented them by composing what is now the fourth voyage to the land of horses, Houyhnhnmland, and then returning to what is now the second voyage, to the land of giants, Brobdingnag. By 1725 he was boasting in letters to Pope that he thought he had something truly splendid on his hands, and he asked his friend to arrange for publication. Pope handled all the necessary details in England. After a decade and a half, Swift made good on his original commitment, though Martinus Scriblerus fell out and Lemuel Gulliver dropped in.

At the end of the Travels, Gulliver takes umbrage that so much travel writing in his generation imposes “the grossest falsities on the unwary reader” (p. 289). He boasts that he has kept out all “strange improbable tales” (p. 289) and claims he “relates only plain facts that happened in such distant countries, where we have not the least interest with respect either to trade or negotiations” (p. 291). Gulliver’s claims of disinterest are hard to corroborate as Swift makes sure to place the four lands of his adventures in those sectors of the globe least known and traveled by the British, by the Europeans, or by anyone in 1726. The title page of Gulliver’s Travels promises a collection of travels to “Remote Nations of the WORLD.” As far as readers can tell from the maps produced in the text for each voyage, Lilliput is located in the wastes of the Indian Ocean, hundreds of leagues southwest of Sumatra and considerably west of Van Diemen’s land and the Australian continent. Brobdingnag is a forbidding, mysterious, and unexplored gateway to a supposed northwest passage comprising present-day Alaska. Laputa bears the designation on its map of “parts unknown” and appears adrift in the Pacific well to the east of Japan. Gulliver’s final journey to Houyhnhnmland places him off the long southern coast of Australia beneath present-day Tasmania and in waters near the Antarctic ridge. Good luck, gentle map-plotter!

Swift and the Background of Gulliver’s Travels

Of Swift’s life and career in general it is enough to say that he experienced a difficult childhood. His father died before his birth, and his mother virtually abandoned him to a nurse and to relatives for sustenance. Perhaps this is why Gulliver admiringly points out that in Lilliput a child is never “under any obligation to his father for begetting him, or to his mother for bringing him into the world” (p. 65). As a young man, Swift began with great ambitions for political preferment at the hands of his distant relative, the statesman Sir William Temple, but found himself frustrated at every turn by what he perceived as the false promises of supporters and patrons, including the chief ministers of state and the monarchs of England. Swift could well understand Gulliver’s resolve in Lilliput “never more to put any confidence in princes or ministers, where I could possibly avoid it” (p. 81).

Gulliver notes in his visit to the land of the dead during his third voyage how three English kings, presumably the last two Stuart kings and William III, admitted “they did never once prefer any person of merit, unless by mistake” (p. 202). That would explain Swift’s predicament as a political aspirant. Merit disqualified him. It is no coincidence that he overlapped the time period of Gulliver’s Travels, 1699-1715, with the period of his own service in England up to the treason trial of his employers, Robert Harley, the earl of Oxford, and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. All his life Swift deeply resented that his initial forays into politics had gone so badly for him and, ultimately, for those whose support he needed. Many of Gulliver’s adventures in the Travels are enmeshed in the particular controversies of the period that Swift experienced directly, and though interest in these matters among today’s readers may prove negligible, it is fair to say that the general context for Gulliver’s Travels is disappointment.

When the Hanoverian kings (the first of the Georges) came to power in 1714, Swift’s career as a writer, a historian, and a satirist turned full force against those running the government in England. Swift distrusted the new regime, which he thought materially obsessed and culturally deprived.