Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

About This Project: Questions Answered

Lost Mail

Ineedto Know some excellent books. Could u giveme a list please. His life and his family. What nationality. When born/ died. What are some good highlights in one of his bests books so such as 3 or 4 lines of that book. I wrote to you about a week ago and didn't know where to look and i read some answers under ANSWERED QUESTIONS and went to dead list and found that people say to you, write the answer from the letter in the dead list so you can find it really quick. So please write it there if possible please?

Swift wrote only three books: Battle of the Books, A Tale of a Tub, and Gulliver's Travels. Otherwise his works included articles, pamphlets, poetry and letters. My site focuses on Gulliver's Travels. You can find some choice quotes from Gulliver's Travels at http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/quotes/gulliver.html. There are links to texts of the other two at http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/sources/texts.html.

Swift was born in 1667 in Ireland of English parents, educated and lived in Ireland until he was 22, lived his young adult life in England and got his Master's degree at Oxford, returned to Ireland, got his PhD in Dublin, then shuttled between England and Ireland until he was almost 40, and then settled in Ireland, only visiting England twice more. Both countries claim him. He made it clear he was born in Ireland, but often complained about living there, but wrote on behalf of Irish causes and became known as an Irish patriot. He died in Dublin in 1745. see http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/sources/biography.html

p.s. You could have tried a little harder. Everything you asked was somewhere on the site.

Did Swift make this book to confuse seniors in high school?

On the other hand, there is a thorough body of research into decoding some of the more obscure passages proving that Swift was most interested in giving full employment to English PhD candidates and literary critics. Though there is also speculation that the intent there was to give them something to do, these being unfit for any productive human activity.

On the serious side, it doesn't have to be hard. Read it straight ahead without interpretation. Isaac Asimov thought it was one of the first Science Fiction stories written. The characters and situations are funny on their own. Don't think to much. It will only ruin it.

message = I am writing a research paper on topic inside this book. My topic: To invesigate Swift's satire on the dicotomy of man in Gulliver's fourth voyage.

I am having a little trouble finding divisions for my thesis. Some possible divisions are: Gullier's comparison of humans to Yahoos; The yahoos and houyhnhnms actions tward gulliver; and Gulliver's return home from his voyage.

Also, I need more sourses, could you reccomend some books? I don't have an e-mail address, please put your answer the dead letter archive.

I've started to collect references for Part IV. See http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/sources/part4.html

Hi,I'm brazilian, my name is xxx I'm learning english at school and my school asked me to reading a book and tell it in a few words. So, I choose Gulliver's Travels. My doubt is: is Gulliver's Travels a real history???

On the other hand, since I don't like things to be too simple, there is a lot of history in GT. Many of the characters and events described in the book are modeled after true events and people of Swift's time and before. For example, Flimnap, the Lord High Treasurer of Lilliput, is believed to represent Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister of England during the reign of George I and the Big Endian schism described later in that voyage is a satire upon the English Reformation and Civil War. There was no war over breaking eggs, but there was great turmoil in England over the apparently minor doctrinal differences between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England.

I could not find any illustrations or information on prints for Gulliver's by Charles E. Brock. I have some old prints by Brock and other illustrators. I was told that they came from a museum for children, but dont know much more about them.

My best source on illustrators is in French:
http://www.ricochet-jeunes.org/biblio/base10/b/brock.htm

Charles Edmund Brock (1870-1938)
Peintre et dessinateur anglais 
Repres biographiques :
Charles Edmund Brock est nŽ ˆ Cambridge le 5
fŽvrier 1870. Il entra ˆ l'atelier du sculpteur
Henry Wiles, et commena ˆ l'‰ge de vingt ans
ˆ illustrer des livres, dans un style o se fait
sentir l'influence de Hugh Thompson. Il fournit
l'illustration de la quasi-totalitŽ des classiques
anglais, d'abord en noir et blanc, puis ˆ partir
de 1898, en couleur. 

Les ouvrages illustrŽs par Charles Edmund Brock :
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (Quatre Filles
   du Dr March), Pearson, 1904. 
James Fenimore Cooper, The prairie, 25 ill. 
Daniel De Foe, Robinson CrusoŽ, Service and Paton, 16 ill. 
Walter Scott, IvanhoŽ, Service and Paton, 16 ill. 
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's travels, 1894, 100 ill. 

You can try some of the rare book sites like http://www.alibris.com or 
http://www.abebooks.com to track down more info about editions and values.

You'll have to qualify the bit about "his vicious attacks on his contemopraries"
before I can take this question seriously.  Swift was a compassionate man,
who was a good and loyal friend, and dealt kindly with strangers.  He was
afterall a priest and a good one.  Read his correspondence and comments
from his contemporaries to get a better idea of the man.  There is a lot
of crap floating around about him being a bitter recluse, but then you
read letters saying what fun he was at parties and how his friends miss
his company (he was in Ireland and they were in England).

Swift was also a political creature, who made enemies through his activism.
He was deeply involved with the Tory government which ended the long,
costly war with France, and opposed the outright corruption of earlier
administrations.  Due to the ineptness of George I, the Whigs returned
to power and brought the full force of government against Swift's colleagues
(and Swift).  Much of Gulliver's Travels, esp. the first two parts, is a
commentary on those recent events.

As to your thesis, I'm uncertain how to prove this point.  For instance,
I'm not sure what you'd call "moderate".  I tend to think of Swift as
conservative in this area.  The part where he has people from the past
conjured up (Part III) and establishes that humanity has de-evolved
certainly strongly supports this view.  And the Yahoos seem to hammer
away at that point with no question.   He definitely makes the point
that things had been getting worse, a hallmark of the conservative.

Part III also includes a lot of commentary on the Enlightenment,
esp. the Sciences, which suggests that progress isn't always a good
thing.  He was mostly right, because there was a lot of bad science
going around and it was hard to see how some of those discoveries
were going to help humanity.  Afterall, the most profound technological
achievement up to that time was the gunpowder.  Again, this is a
classic conservative position.

The only mitigating circumstance I can see is that I believe Swift intended
a compassionate view of human failings.  He wanted to expose those failings
first, and he wanted to raise our indignation at those failings, and he wanted
to break our pride where it wasn't deserved, and he hoped acknowledgement
would remedy some things, but ultimately he understood that those failings
were part of human nature and not changeable.

That's what makes Swift different.  He's a compassionate conservative.
He may attack the profession of medicine, but some of his best friends
were doctors.  And he couldn't stand religious intolerance, but he was a
priest.  Even more than that, whatever he said, you need to look at what
he did.  His work with the poor of his parish was noted regularly.  And his
"Modest Proposal" and "Drapier's Letters" as well as Gulliver are masterful
attacks on tyranny, intolerance, and corruption.

-- Lee

>	Jonathan Swift, in spite of his vicious attacks on his
>contemopraries, can
>rightly be called a moderate in his views on human nature. I need to write a
>paper , citing examples from Gulliver's Travels which attack or support this
>statement.
> Can you help me out?
>
>
>	Thank you
>
>	MKIELB7210

see http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm -- Lee
 >URL = 
>message = why, is this no longer, acopy right?

I don't remember where I got the information, but I checked
another source and it says that Kepler only used Earth (one moon)
and Jupiter (4 known moons) as points of reference, speculating
that Mars must have two.  I know I wouldn't have mentioned
Neptune on my own say-so, but must have copied it from a 
book.  BTW, I have a small image of the "Ptolomeic Universe"
from 1513 showing Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury,
and one other illegible (probably the Moon) orbiting the Earth.
I'll correct the entry at my next chance.

-- Lee

>URL = 
>message = Just a little precision: (well, two, actually)
> It is Mercury, or Venus you meant, I suppose instead of Neptune,
>when saying it had no satellites, and putting it in order
>with the Earth and Mars. I'm not sure Neptune had been discovered
>at the time, in fact, I doubt it very much.
> Jupiter, on the other hand, had been observed many times since
>Galileo. It was beleived to be travelling with four satellites.
> 
>It doesn't change anything to what you said, put acurateness
>contributes to put it in perspective.
>
>Anyway, it's a pretty good site you've got over here, I find it
>very usefull for my studies (3rd year English in France)

I know it's been translated extensively.  It appeared in French
a few months after it was first printed, and then in German and
Dutch the same year.  I don't know how many languages it has
appeared in and which languages specifically.  What did you want
to know?   -- Lee

>URL = 
>message = Do you have any information about _Gulliver's Travels_ 
>translated into different languages?
>
>Te-hsing SHAN

The Lilliputians (i.e. the people of Lilliput) are the more well-known,
but he also meets the Blefuscudians, of the same small race, but of
a different, enemy nation, Blefuscu.  -- Lee

>     Please can you help me, what are the name of the  pocket sized people
>call that Gulliver meets on his travels.   Any help Appreciated