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Gulliver's Travels -- or, more properly, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver -- is my favorite work of fiction in the English language. So it's only logical that Gulliver.cc would be my Lilliputian harbor on the Brobdingnagian sea.

Like the fictitious Gulliver I find our world a place of beauty and horror, rapture and disgust. This web site is all about me pretending to be Gulliver: exploring our bizarre world and trying to make sense of its weirdness and wonder.

Now, if words like "Lilliputian" and "Brobdingnagian" are strange to you, I recommend you visit this marvelous web site about Jonathan Swift's brilliant satirical novel.

Not a children's book

It's a pity that most people today think of "Gulliver's Travels" as a children's story. It was not intended to be anything of the kind! But after few hundred years of editions which reprint only the Lilliput adventure (a mere quarter of the whole book!) the reputation has stuck: it's about "that guy who finds the nation of cute tiny people." A shameful undertatement. In fact, the book is a complex and mature -- if cynical -- indictment of all that is worst in human nature.

Swift's most devastating criticisms are often expressed through secondary characters who are horrified by Gulliver's accounts of his past life and his fellow Englishmen.

For example, the intelligent horses in the last part of the book are perplexed by Gulliver's account of people back home who do not always speak the truth -- the concept of lying is mysterious to them. They are equally puzzled by Gulliver's explanation of the medical profession, since much of the illness that Gulliver speaks of treating seems to have been deliberately brought on by the patient's overeating or immoderate drinking.

The most famous and often-repeated of the comments Gulliver receives from his hosts/captors comes from the King of Brobdingnag. When Gulliver describes European life, customs, and history, the king observes that Europeans must be "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

The book's reputation as a "Children's Story" seems to have arisen by accident. Over the years many editors have feared negative reaction to some of the harshest satire from the book, and have responded by cutting those parts out and printing the rest.

And, predictably, while they were at this task they also tended to remove all that struck them as prurient or scatalogical. You can tell if your copy of "Travels" has been censored if there's no mention of exactly how Gulliver put out the fire in the Lilliputian palace. If you can't guess, then this illustration by Luis Quintanilla from one of the unexpurgated editions explains it clearly.

The Travels Continue...

Swift's masterpiece was first printed -- anonymously -- in 1726. We can tell much about its immediate success by the mere fact that it was translated into French, German, and Dutch the following year. That same year, Swift added the "letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson" to the text -- a letter which refers to the sensation caused by the book.

For us in 21st-century America, where every profitable movie must be followed by a (usually inferior) sequel, it comes as no surprise that there have been "continuing adventures" of the characters in Gulliver's Travels. Interestingly enough, it is rarely Gulliver himself who is featured in these sequels, but the intriguing Lilliputians, Brobdingagians, Laputans, and so on.

One of the best-known sequels is the 1946 children's book Mistress Masham's Repose. The novel is by T.H. White of The Once and Future King fame. White even appears in the story through a thinly-disguised alter ego -- a charming touch that I'm sure would have pleased Swift. In this story, a ten-year-old girl discovers that her family property has for generations been the refuge for tiny people, the descendants of Lilliputians who came to England with Gulliver way back in the 1700s. I found it thoroughly engrossing, and especially enjoyed its rush toward a climax of nail-biting excitement.

More recently, the redoubtable and erudite Matthew Hodgart has penned a sequel with the authentically eighteenth-century-ish title A New Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Being the Fifth Part of the Travels Into Several Remote Parts of the World By Lemuel Gulliver. The book is now out of print but well worth tracking down. I found it in several public libraries with little trouble. (And if you do a web search for this title, don't be surprised when you find listings for this book credited Jonathan Swift as the author!)

Perhaps my friends in the UK can tell me more about the Antelope Company TV series, which ran for four years in the late 1980s. There are several novels as well, but I have no idea if the program was based on the books or if they were written as tie-ins to the show. In any case, the basic idea was that three Lilliputians build a miniature replica of Gulliver's ship and sail in it to England, where they are befriended by two young people who protect them from unscrupulous grownups. (If that was the basic tension in each episode, the show was a sort of a British Land of the Giants -- which probably owes its genesis to Gulliver anyway.)

British sci-fi author Adam Roberts wrote a dark and intriguing short story in which Lilliputians and Blefescans have been enslaved by a race of giants -- in other words, by us.

It's called Swiftly (get it?), and it's made all the more disturbing by Roberts' keen sense of detail and atmosphere.

Thanks to the web site you're reading now, I heard from a nice gentleman named Barry Cunningham, whose father had written a Gulliver sequel seventy years ago! In honor of the centennial of the elder Mr. Cunningham's birth, Barry built a web site which allows the work to finally be read by others. It is in fact quite ingenious, and I commend it to your attention. The novel is called There’s a New Shuffle in Lilliput.

I know there have been many, many more -- and I'm counting on you, dear reader, to tell me about the ones I've missed.