Reader discussion: Gulliver's Travels

Public reader discussion about Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.

Help! I have an old edition of Gulliver’s Travels I found at a thrift store. I cannot find the same edition online anywhere. At least not with the same cover. Is it rare? Can anyone tell me anything about it?

By CleverHeron5

The first edition came out in 1726, and this one feels more like it’s from the early 1900s. To me, a rare book is mostly desirable because you’re basically holding it as it first showed up for regular readers. Like, it mattered early on and helped the whole thing spread until it became the well-known book it is. If you’ve got a copy from around 200 years later, I don’t really see how that fits into the actual history of the writing—scarce or not, it probably won’t be that sought-after. Sure, there are exceptions when the book is valuable as an art piece (fancy binding, original lithographs, that kind of thing), or if a later printing was a big deal in getting the book back out to more people—like the Rockwell Kent Moby-Dick edition that helped it get rediscovered in the 20th century. But I don’t think this one really falls into either of those situations.

Message of Gulliver's Travels

By oldOwl1998

I honestly laughed at how clueless Gulliver can be—he’s acting all “civilized” while he’s doing something pretty barbaric to an entire city. It’s like he can’t really see what the whole thing means or how huge the consequences are for anyone down below. And Swift himself was a church guy, so it’s not like this book is some random shock value thing—still, the story keeps going back to bodily stuff and really nasty images. That feels like a pretty obvious moral clash to me. Also, I can’t stop thinking maybe Swift is basically pointing out the cracks in that whole humanism idea that was getting more popular back then—like the focus on the individual human experience. Is that way off? If you’ve read Gulliver’s Travels, how did you take it?

That time Jonathan Swift made fun of AI in Gulliver's Travels

By spark

Just reread this and it feels ridiculously ahead of its time lol. Gulliver's Travels The first professor I came across was in this huge room with like forty students around him. After he said hello, he noticed me staring at this big frame taking up most of the room and basically told me he’d come up with a way to improve speculative knowledge using practical, mechanical methods. He was sure people would eventually see how useful it was, and thought nothing more brilliant had ever popped into anyone else’s head. Everyone knew how much work it takes the normal way to learn arts and sciences, but with his machine, even someone totally ignorant could, for not much money and a bit of physical effort, put together books on philosophy, poetry, politics, law, math, and theology בלי needing genius or study at all. Then he took me over to the frame, with all the students lined up around it. It was a twenty-foot square thing in the middle of the room. The surface was made of little wooden pieces, some a bit bigger than dice, all connected with thin wires. Each piece had paper glued on it, and on the paper were all the words of their language in every form, but all jumbled up. The professor told me to watch because he was about to start the machine. At his signal, the students each grabbed an iron handle, forty of them around the edges, and gave them a sharp turn, which changed the whole arrangement of words. Then thirty-six of the boys read the lines softly as they came up, and when they found three or four words that could make part of a sentence, they told the four others, who wrote them down. They repeated this three or four times, and each time the machine was made so the words landed in different places as the little blocks flipped over. They spent six hours a day doing this, and the professor showed me a bunch of big volumes already filled with broken-up sentences that he planned to stitch together into a full collection of all arts and sciences. He also said it could still be improved a lot, and done much faster, if the public would just fund five hundred of these frames in Lagado and make the managers pool all their collections. He told me this invention had taken up all his thoughts since he was young, that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into it, and had carefully figured out the usual ratio in books between particles, nouns, verbs, and the other parts of speech.

Gulliver's travels into madness

By Crimson_Saddle3913

Just wrapped up Gulliver’s Travels, and honestly in the first few books it felt really hard to say what Gulliver was seeing was “made up,” since he brings back souvenirs and there are other people who can back it up, not just him. But I’m mostly gonna talk about Book 4, ignoring the rest, because it feels way different. Like, Gulliver ends up made captain, then his crew betrays him and leaves him stranded on an uncharted island. He wanders around looking for food and shelter, then runs into the natives, and they’re not exactly welcoming—trying to kill him. He escapes, but then it’s basically just sadness, despair, and this intense hatred toward mankind for what they did, even though he never went in wanting to hurt anyone. And then he starts getting more and more cut off from reality. He starts seeing horses out in the fields, living like everything’s calm and fair and they don’t have all that hatred. He goes to them, and surprisingly they don’t act bothered. Slowly he’s like, appreciating their whole way of life, imagining he can actually communicate, copying how they move and sound, preferring it over the whole complicated, messy, “civilized” world where people have all these pointless reasons. By the time he’s realizing his own view of reality was messed up, it turns into him wanting to bring that simpler philosophy back to the “civilized” humans of his world. But when he finally tries to return, he gets attacked by people again for no real reason, and it just spirals—despair, suicide attempt, until a kind guy named Don Pedro saves him. Book 4 can be read a bunch of different ways, and I don’t feel like it’s just one simple thing. It’s got madness, isolation, betrayal, tragedy, all that meaninglessness/nihilism stuff, but also hope. Gulliver’s Travels overall is really well done and deserves all the praise, but Book 4 alone honestly feels like it’s worth discussing way more, like it could stand on its own and still spark debate.

Gulliver's Travels features people who want to war with each other over conflicting views on how to open eggs. What was Swift satirizing in 18th century society in this depiction?

By littlemirrorrapid

Why do the factions keep fighting over stuff that feels so minor?