When Gulliver’s Travels was first published in October 1726, readers never saw the whole of what Jonathan Swift had written. One entire episode, an account of the floating island of Laputa’s rebellion against its king, an unmistakable parallel to a real political controversy raging in Ireland at the time, was suppressed before publication, considered too dangerous to print. Known as the “Lindalino” episode, it vanished from the text for decades, a casualty of the same political caution that Swift’s satire was busy mocking. It has since become a prized discovery for scholars and readers alike, now restored as an appendix in a major new edition of the novel.
That act of censorship says something important about the book itself. Swift’s account of Lemuel Gulliver’s adventures in the fantastical societies of “remote nations” was an instant best-seller on publication and has remained lodged in the public imagination ever since, functioning as both a satiric fantasy and an unflinching analysis of the human condition. Three hundred years on, it remains one of the very few works of English literature that also counts as a landmark of world literature—translated, adapted, and referenced across languages and centuries.
Yet that popularity has come at a cost to how the book is understood. Shrunk down into children’s editions full of tiny Lilliputians and towering Brobdingnagians, Gulliver’s Travels is often remembered today as a whimsical adventure story rather than what it actually is: a furious, unsparing satire of human vanity, political corruption, scientific pretension, and the very idea of reason itself. Beneath the miniature kingdoms and talking horses lies one of the bleakest, most searching accounts of human nature ever put to paper.
David Womersley, until recently Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy, is internationally recognized as one of the foremost living experts on Swift. His landmark scholarly edition of Gulliver’s Travels, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, drew on the widest possible historical collation of editions printed in Swift’s lifetime, and a new tercentenary edition now complements and extends that work for the book’s 300th anniversary. In the conversation that follows, we mark three centuries of Gulliver’s Travels by asking what the book actually says, why it was dangerous enough to be censored, and why its bleakest insights may be more relevant now than ever.
Charles Carlini: The “Lindalino” episode was cut before Gulliver’s Travels was even published, because of how closely it mirrored a real political crisis in Ireland. What did Swift risk by writing it, and why do you think it matters that readers finally have access to it?
David Womersley: The “Lindalino” episode survives in a single, very special copy of the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels. This belonged to Swift’s good friend Charles Ford, who bound it with blank interleaves and, for the most part, wrote small corrections to the text published by Motte in 1726, as well as this longer fragment of narrative. We don't know quite how Ford became aware of this suppressed text—it may be that Swift composed it specially for him, since Ford was hostile to the Hanoverian royal family and so this attack on monarchical despotism would have appealed to him (as surely it did also to Swift). But Ford was also secretive about this fragment, even with Swift, which is an interesting detail. Swift may have shared this bespoke element of the book with Ford under confidentiality, which Ford broke by making a copy for his own use, then copying it again into his interleaved copy. At any rate, Swift did not include the “Lindalino” episode in the 1735 Dublin edition, with which he was closely involved; he knew that its final reference to king-killing and the remodeling of the state made it unpublishable. Even so, we can infer much from the “Lindalino” episode. Firstly, it reveals the curiously loose or open texture of the narrative of Gulliver’s Travels, in which episodes can be inserted or removed without disturbing the narrative as a whole. Secondly, it suggests the text’s coterie existence before publication, when Swift shared knowledge of his book with a small group of trusted intimates. It speaks powerfully to the conditions of suspicion and surveillance under which Swift composed Gulliver’s Travels, and reminds us of how skillfully he sailed very close to the political wind, and of the risks he ran should he have misjudged that.
CC: Your 2012 Cambridge Edition was a landmark scholarly achievement, and now you’ve produced a new tercentenary edition, Gulliver’s Travels: The Cambridge Anniversary Edition. What can readers expect from this new edition that they wouldn't have found in the original, and who is it designed for?
DW: The 2012 edition was what one might call a “full-fat” scholarly edition. The anniversary edition has pared away much of the apparatus such an edition requires, and the annotation is leaner, focused more narrowly on glossing words or phrases that might puzzle the modern reader. However, the text is the same as that established for the 2012 edition; the introduction is new and slightly re-angled; all the maps and plates are included, as are the full set of frontispiece portraits and title pages; and—something that was not included in the 2012 edition—photographs are provided of two annotations in what looks like Swift’s handwriting in the copy of the first edition thought to have belonged to him, which is now kept in the Robinson Library at Armagh.
CC: Three hundred years after its first publication, why do you think Gulliver’s Travels still deserves this level of scholarly attention rather than settling into the status of a classic that’s been fully explained?
DW: I can’t reckon up the number of times I have read Gulliver’s Travels. I first came across it as a child, in the Ladybird illustrated and abbreviated version. But every time I read it, I notice something new, or I have my thoughts turned into a fresh channel by a connection I had overlooked, either with another detail of Gulliver’s Travels, or with another piece by Swift, or indeed with another book altogether (the afterlife of Gulliver’s Travels in twentieth-century literature, principally in the work of Borges and Nabokov, is very rich). So I don’t think it will ever be “fully explained.” And of course, we stand in perpetual need of its unignorable reminders of human vice and folly.
CC: The book was an instant bestseller in 1726, devoured by readers across British society. What do you think made it so immediately popular, given how bleak much of its message actually is?
DW: I think the mixture of wild fantasy and bitter, sometimes even savage, satire was a winning combination. The fantasy draws readers in and opens them up to the satire’s aggression.
CC: Critics have described Swift’s satire as “savage,” a word that keeps coming up around this book. Where do you think that savagery is most visible, and does it ever tip into something like real despair about human nature?
DW: Part IV disturbed the book’s first readers, and in the nineteenth century, Thackeray denounced Swift as a misanthropic madman because of that part. Certainly, the conclusion of Part IV, with Gulliver living in the stable with his horses and shunning his wife and children, leaves a bitter taste. In a letter to Pope, Swift explained that he loved individuals but despised and hated groups. He had no hope for humanity as a species, while feeling great tenderness for particular persons.
CC: Of the four voyages—Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms—which do you think is most misunderstood or underappreciated by modern readers?
DW: Probably Part III, the voyage to Laputa. At first publication, Gay wrote to Swift and reported that readers liked Part III least.
CC: The floating island of Laputa satirizes scientific and intellectual pretension. Does that section feel newly relevant in an age preoccupied with artificial intelligence and technological overreach?
DW: Yes, and so the fortunes of Part III might revive! Certainly, Swift would have been both appalled and fascinated by AI, which, in some respects, realizes the “language machine” Swift imagines in chapter 5 of Part III. He would also have sneered at searchable databases such as ECCO and EEBO, which let modern scholars (including myself) appear far more learned than they actually are.
CC: Your 2012 edition drew on a wide historical collation of editions published during Swift’s own lifetime. How much do those early editions differ, and what got lost or changed along the way?
DW: Interesting and important variants appear, particularly between the first edition (whose physical bibliography is exceptionally complicated) and the edition published in Dublin in 1735. The first-edition publisher, Benjamin Motte, agreed to publish without fully knowing the text and based only on sample material. When the whole manuscript was delivered to him at night, clandestinely and anonymously, he realized that some of the text was too directly satirical to be published safely, so he employed someone to revise certain passages in the direction of greater suavity and politeness (things that Swift himself, of course, particularly detested). So all of that needed sorting out and clarifying.
CC: Swift spent much of his life as a clergyman and eventually became Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. How should we square that role with a book this savage in its assessment of human beings?
DW: Swift’s Christianity was not of the cuddly sort. He revealingly said that, when he was preaching, he told the congregation what their duty was, and tried to convince them that it was so—so nothing there about consolation or forgiveness or salvation.
CC: The novel’s satire shows political corruption, mob behavior, and contempt for expertise. Which parts of Gulliver’s Travels feel most like they could have been written about the present day?
DW: Events on Europe’s eastern borders suggest that the Lilliputians’ desire to reduce the neighboring empire of Blefuscu has found an echo in some modern governments. Sadly, the wisdom of the king of Brobdingnag is not so well represented in the world today.
CC: If Swift could see how his book has been read, adapted, and softened into children's stories over three hundred years, what do you think he'd find most infuriating, and is there anything about its afterlife he might actually have enjoyed?
DW: He would have bridled at the amputation of Parts III and IV, no doubt. On the other hand, he may have foreseen it. In Part I, Gulliver is threatened by a plot to starve him to death, whereupon “five or six Thousand of his Majesty's Subjects might, in two or three Days, cut your Flesh from you Bones, take it away by Cart-loads, and bury it in distant Parts to prevent Infection; leaving the Skeleton as a Monument of Admiration to Posterity.” This might be thought to foreshadow the fate of Gulliver’s Travels itself, which has been variously dismembered, dispersed, and recycled, while nevertheless remaining “a Monument of Admiration to Posterity.”
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