In his estimation, the Hanoverian period of corrupt ministerial government, of finance-dominated ethics, and of debased popular culture took a considerable toll on public values of honor and integrity, on the nobler forms of literary expression, and generally on all matters of good taste.

In Gulliver’s Travels, the figure who came to epitomize the negative values of the age was the shrewd, vain, and eminently powerful chief minister, Robert Walpole. Walpole ran what even at the time was deemed a spoils system in England, and Gulliver explains to the horses in Houyhnhnmland what a chief minister is: “That these ‘ministers’ having all employments at their disposal, preserve themselves in power by bribing the majority of a senate or great council; and at last, by an expedient called an ’act of indemnity’ (whereof I described the nature to him) they secure themselves from after reckonings, and retire from the public, laden with the spoils of the nation” (p. 255). Swift wrote of Walpole’s conduct as chief minister: “If it be rapacious, insolent, partial, palliating long and deep diseases of the public with empirical remedies, false, disguised, impudent, malicious, revengeful; you shall infallibly find the private life of the conductor to answer in every point; nay, what is more, every twinge of the gout or gravel will be felt in their consequences by the community” (“A Letter to the Writer of an Occasional Paper,” p. 97). Walpole began as treasurer (represented in Lilliput as Flimnap) around the time when Swift began working on the Travels, and connived himself into the stewardship as chief minister of all England by the time Swift finished.

Many of the events of Gulliver’s Travels key on Walpole’s domination in Georgian England, though any application of a specific political allegory in Gulliver’s Travels, insofar as its adventures detail specific events and incidents from English politics, works best in the voyages to Lilliput and Laputa. Generally, the allegorical action in Lilliput pits Belfuscu (France) against Lilliput (England) in what amounts to a long, drawn-out rivalry mirroring the War of the Spanish Succession in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The politics surrounding the flying island of Laputa center on Swift’s reaction to English colonial policy in regard to his adopted home, Ireland, especially to the controversy attending England’s attempt to debase the coinage in Ireland in the 1720S at the expense of the copper content of the penny.

Specifically, in Lilliput Swift plays out all of England’s internal affairs with the chicaneries of ministers, the intrigues of court sycophants, the bathos of preferment (“rope dancers”), and the paranoia of state trials. The Tramsecksan (big heels) and Salmseksan (little heel) parties are the Tories and Whigs of early Hanoverian England. The rift from Catholicism that marked English religious history through the centuries finds its analog in the absurd notion of the Big Endians (Anglican Church) and Little Endians (radical Protestant sects) debating the virtues of the end on which individuals choose to break their eggs. In the allegory of affairs surrounding the continental wars, Gulliver finds himself something of a standing army in Lilliput, having “reason to believe I might be a match for the greatest armies they could bring against me” (p. 29). But he also notes that the Lilliputians could barely keep a person of his bulk nourished, which, though “they supplied me as fast as they could” (p. 30) would “be very expensive, and might cause a famine” (p. 38), a point very similar to Swift’s often repeated claim that a standing army billeted in England would draw on the national debt and disrupt the economy at the expense of resources better spent on the navy. It is no accident that Gulliver becomes most useful to Lilliput later in the adventure as a naval bulwark when he wades into shoulder-deep water and disables the rival Blefuscudian (allegorically, the French) fleet.

There is far less specific political allegory and far more general satire on human institutions in the second and fourth books of the Travels, but both of those (and a good part of the third book as well) touch on another major cultural controversy of Swift’s time, one in which his own writing plays a significant role—the contest between the Ancients and the Moderns over whether the past or present contributed most to human civilization. Swift tends to favor the ethos of the humanistic ancients over the accomplishments of the progressivist moderns; indeed, in various ways throughout the Travels he excoriates modern politics, ethics, and innovations in experimental science, philosophy, economics, technology, law, and medicine. The third voyage to Laputa and environs is the emblem of modernist pursuits in the Travels, and the very limited attention span of the Laputians suggests qualities of modern life that exercised Swift most: a distorted sense of culture and history and an essential ungenerosity of spirit.

The Satire of the Travels

No matter how ingenious Swift proves himself at working contemporary affairs into the narrative of his adventure story in strange lands, the general reader surely gravitates toward the more compelling psychology of miniaturization in the first voyage, gigantism in the second, fantastic islands in the third, and civilized animals in the last. Swift’s satiric vision is too universal to get bogged down for long in any debate over historical particulars. What matters for him more is the general satiric notion that things keep getting worse: “But men degenerate every day, merely by the folly, the perverseness, the avarice, the tyranny, the pride, the treachery, or inhumanity of their own kind” (“Further Thoughts on Religion,” p. 264). In each of the voyages of Gulliver’s Travels, even if the lands are unknown, there is mention that things were better at an earlier time, that institutions and customs were less ridiculous, perverse, and corrupt.

Some of Swift’s most intense writing as a satirist in the Travels centers on the theme of satiric degeneration. In the third voyage, Gulliver comes upon the immortal Struldbruggs on the island of Luggnagg. He cannot wait to see what immortals look like and how they behave, how they have assimilated to the trials and opportunities of living eternally. Instead, Gulliver discovers that the immortal Struldbruggs continue degenerating at the same rate experienced by mortals during the course of a normal life. Swift’s vision of the Struldbruggs calls forth a barrage of satiric language on the decay of human systems, both physical and institutional.

At ninety they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue without encreasing or diminishing. In talking they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations (p. 214).

Not only do the Struldbruggs degenerate over time, but they lose all customary connection to family, community, nation, even to language, finally “living like foreigners in their own country” (p. 214), akin to Gulliver’s condition at the end of the Travels.