60 Fun Facts About Gulliver's Travels

In which year was Gulliver's Travels first published?

It came out anonymously in London and was an immediate success, with imitations, parodies and 'keys' following within months.

What is Gulliver's first name?

The full original title runs on for a whole sentence, beginning Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, In Four Parts.

What was Gulliver's profession before he became a ship's captain?

He sails as a ship's surgeon on the first voyages and only takes command of a merchantman in Part IV, out of boredom.

What is the name of the ship wrecked in a storm on Gulliver's first voyage?

It was bound for the East Indies and hit a violent storm north-west of Van Diemen's Land, today's Tasmania.

Roughly how tall are the Lilliputians?

They are one-twelfth human height; their neighbours across the channel are the same size and just as quarrelsome.

What trivial question divides the two warring religious sects of Lilliput?

Freud's phrase 'the narcissism of small differences' has been applied to the resulting war; computer scientists later borrowed the sects' names too.

What are the two rival Lilliputian political parties, parodies of the Tories and Whigs, distinguished by?

The Tories were the High-Heels and the Whigs the Low-Heels; the emperor's heir hedges by wearing one heel higher than the other.

Which rival island nation's fleet does Gulliver capture for Lilliput?

The two islands stand for Britain and France, separated by a channel 800 yards wide; Gulliver's refusal to conquer the rival outright turns the emperor against him.

What unorthodox method does Gulliver use to put out a fire in the Lilliputian palace?

The act is listed among his crimes when he is charged with treason and sentenced to be blinded.

What punishment is Gulliver sentenced to in Lilliput before he escapes?

The sentence parodies the impeachment of the Tory ministers Harley and Bolingbroke, who had made peace with France.

Which Lilliputian official is usually read as a caricature of Sir Robert Walpole?

Swift had a personally turbulent relationship with the Whig statesman, and the whole first part is his most political.

What is the name of the land of giants Gulliver reaches on his second voyage?

The word Brobdingnagian sits in the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for gigantic; the grass there is as tall as trees.

Roughly how tall is the farmer who finds Gulliver in the land of giants?

Gulliver works it out from the man's ten-yard stride; the giants are about twelve times human size, mirroring the Lilliputians.

What is the name of the giant farmer's daughter who becomes Gulliver's nurse and companion?

She is nine and 'small for her age' at not above forty feet; she follows Gulliver into the queen's service.

What does the farmer do with Gulliver before selling him to the queen?

The constant display makes Gulliver ill; the queen then has a portable 'travelling box' built for him.

What carries Gulliver's travelling box off and drops it into the sea, ending his stay among the giants?

Earlier a monkey had carried him to a roof and a jealous court dwarf had loosed giant wasps on him.

What especially horrifies the giant king in Gulliver's account of Europe?

James Gillray's 1803 print recast the scene with George III as the giant king peering at a tiny Napoleon.

What is Laputa, the setting of the third voyage?

It is about four and a half miles across and floats by magnetic levitation on an adamantine base.

How does Laputa punish rebellious cities below it?

The cut episode of the rebel city Lindalino was Swift's allegory of Dublin resisting William Wood's debased copper coinage.

Which absurd project is under way at the Grand Academy of Lagado?

Others include softening marble for pillows and detecting conspiracies by examining suspects' excrement.

The Grand Academy of Lagado satirises which real institution?

Swift mocks the blind pursuit of science without practical results and the bureaucracy that funds it.

On the island of Glubbdubdrib, whom does Gulliver converse with?

The magician summons Julius Caesar, Brutus, Homer, Aristotle and Descartes for a debate on ancients versus moderns.

What are the struldbrugs of Luggnagg?

They lack eternal youth, suffer every infirmity of age and are declared legally dead at eighty.

Which real country does Gulliver visit at the end of his third voyage?

He asks the Emperor to excuse him from the ceremony of trampling on the crucifix that was demanded of Dutch traders.

What are the Houyhnhnms?

Swift inverts the old textbook definition of man as the rational animal by making horses reasonable and humans brutes.

What are the Yahoos?

Swift coined the word, and it now means a crude, brutish person; the creatures dig in mud for 'pretty stones'.

Why does Gulliver end up in the land of the horses?

The mutineers turn pirate; the horses' assembly later expels him as a dangerous Yahoo with a semblance of reason.

Which kindly Portuguese captain rescues Gulliver against his will at the end of the book?

Gulliver is disgusted to find that a 'Yahoo' can be wise and generous; critics still argue over what Swift meant by him.

How does Gulliver spend his time after returning home from his last voyage?

He cannot bear to live among 'Yahoos', avoids his wife and family and becomes a recluse.

Which real captain does Gulliver name as inviting him aboard for the disastrous third voyage?

The book came out seven years after Robinson Crusoe and can be read as a point-by-point rebuttal of Defoe's optimism.

Which London publisher first issued the book, using five printing houses to beat pirates?

He also cut the riskiest passages, which is why a later Dublin edition is now treated as the authoritative text.

Why did Swift probably have the manuscript copied out by another hand?

The book was a transparently anti-Whig satire, and his Irish pamphlets had already brought legal trouble.

Which circle of satirists, formed around 1713 with Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot, may have seeded the book?

Swift's job was to satirise the fashionable 'travellers' tales' genre; the club's imaginary author was Martinus Scriblerus.

Which poet added five verses on the book that Swift liked enough to include in the second edition?

Modern editions rarely print them; Pope was one of Swift's closest friends and his host in London.

Which fellow poet said the book was 'universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery'?

The Beggar's Opera author was one of Swift's closest literary friends.

Which Victorian novelist attacked the book as 'blasphemous' for its harshness about human society?

Viscount Bolingbroke, Swift's own friend, had led the earliest complaints about its misanthropy.

Which pair of computing terms for byte order comes straight from the Lilliputian egg quarrel?

The names were chosen ironically: neither ordering is better, but systems that disagree cannot talk to each other.

Which Hayao Miyazaki film takes its name and premise from Swift's Laputa?

A region of Mars's moon Phobos is also named Laputa Regio, because Swift's astronomers 'discovered' two Martian moons long before real ones were found.

Which language, studied by Swift at Trinity College Dublin, may underlie his Lilliputian words?

Isaac Asimov, annotating the book in 1978, thought decoding the words 'a waste of time'; Irving Rothman disagreed.

Which composer wrote a Gulliver Suite for two violins with a Lilliputian chaconne?

Written in 1728-29, it also pairs a loure of the 'well-mannered houyhnhnms' with a fury of the 'naughty yahoos'.

Who starred as a modern-day Gulliver in the 2010 film version?

His Gulliver is a mail-room worker who plagiarises a travel piece; Emily Blunt played the Lilliputian princess.

Which actor played Gulliver in the 1996 television miniseries?

Hanna-Barbera had earlier turned the story into a Saturday-morning cartoon, The Adventures of Gulliver, with a dog called Tag.

Which pioneering French filmmaker made a silent Gulliver film in 1902?

The first American animated feature version followed in 1939, from the Fleischer studio.

What position did Swift hold at St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, from 1713?

He wanted a church post in England, but Queen Anne reportedly disliked him because she thought A Tale of a Tub blasphemous.

Under which pseudonym did Swift write his letters attacking Wood's copper coinage for Ireland?

The Lindalino rebellion in Part III is his private celebration of that campaign, which made him an Irish patriot.

What was Swift's nickname for Esther Johnson, the girl he tutored at Moor Park and was buried beside?

'Vanessa' was the other Esther in his life, Esther Vanhomrigh; the two names have kept biographers busy for centuries.

Which condition, marked by fits of vertigo, plagued Swift throughout his life?

It first struck in 1690 and is now the accepted explanation for the giddiness he complained of for fifty years.

Where in Ireland was much of Gulliver's Travels written?

Composition proper began in 1720, with the mirror-image Parts I and II first, Part IV next and Part III last.

In what order did Swift actually write the four parts?

The third voyage, the grab-bag of Laputa and its neighbours, was the last written, in 1724.

What was Swift's stated aim in writing the book?

Early readers loved it anyway; only later did critics like Bolingbroke complain of its misanthropy.

Which 1735 Irish edition, based on Charles Ford's annotated copy, is Gulliver's authoritative text?

It added a letter from 'Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson' complaining that the first publisher had so mangled the text 'I do hardly know mine own work'.

What is the capital of Lilliput?

The island is said to be twelve miles round; the map, however, draws it nearly the size of Tasmania.

The Lilliputians measure time in what unit?

The war with the neighbouring island has run for 'six and thirty moons', and the emperor is 'past his prime' before thirty.

The rebellion of the city of Lindalino against Laputa in Part III is an allegory for what?

Lindalino stands for Dublin; the passage was cut by early publishers and only restored in 1899.

What is the name of the ship on which Gulliver reaches the land of giants?

Blown off course by storms, its crew abandons Gulliver on a peninsula off the western coast of North America.

To which 'cousin' is the 1735 prefatory letter complaining of Motte's changes addressed?

Gulliver writes that Motte had 'so much altered it that I do hardly know mine own work'.

Gulliver's Travels came out seven years after which optimistic novel by Defoe?

Critic Warren Montag argues Swift wanted to refute the idea that the individual precedes society.

What is the main port of Balnibarbi, where Gulliver waits for a trader bound for Japan?

While waiting he takes a side trip to the sorcerers' island of Glubbdubdrib.

How does Gulliver end up marooned near India at the start of the third voyage?

He is set adrift near a desolate rocky island before the flying island of Laputa appears.

Which schemes are researched at the Grand Academy of Lagado besides sunbeams from cucumbers?

Other projects include mixing paint by smell and finding conspiracies by examining suspects' excrement.