GULLIVER'S TRAVELS REVISITED

'Depicts humanity at its most grotesque': Why the 300-year-old novel Gulliver's Travels is so misunderstood.

First published in 1726, Jonathan Swift's adventure novel has been chopped, changed and adapted ever since. Is it a "misanthropic satire" or a "fantastical nursery tale"?

You may be familiar with the story of Lemuel Gulliver. He wakes up after a shipwreck only to be pinned down by ropes and surrounded by tiny Lilliputians, who clamber up to the incapacitated adventurer.

It's a scene that's been replicated and satirised ever since Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726, 300 years ago.

Yet fewer may know of Gulliver's darker exploits, where the voyaging anti-hero encounters scientists inserting bellows into dogs, or the society of enlightened-yet-murderous talking horses, the Houyhnhnms, who calmly debate eradicating the Yahoos, their brutish human-like cohabitants.

In the three centuries since Swift set out to "vex the world, rather than divert it", as he wrote, two Gullivers have competed for the public imagination: one, the excoriating, misanthropic satire that sends up the Crown, the Church and English politics, and the other, a fantastical nursery tale of an adventurer navigating worlds big and small.

Packed with toilet humour, the original Gulliver's Travels also takes aim at the legal system, colonialism and, ultimately, human nature. It darkly concludes with a Gulliver so disgusted by humans after meeting the rational Houyhnhnms that he spends his final days locked in a stable with a horse.

From its very first edition, Swift's tale has been chopped and changed, adapted and altered. Eventually, the story became larger than life, much like Gulliver in the land of Lilliput.

"It's perhaps one of the most adapted texts in the world," says Daniel Cook, author of Gulliver's Afterlives: 300 Years of Transmedia Adaptation. It has sparked spin-offs, illustrations, plays and films, all contributing to a broad "Gulliveriana". The titular antihero has appeared in Doctor Who and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; he's met Tony Blair, and appears everywhere from family-friendly Disney romps to Soviet critiques of capitalism.

And of all the adaptations, it was those that simplified and sanitised the tale that endured most in the popular imagination, where the darkest episodes were edited, abridged or expunged.

"I doubt Swift would've envisaged Gulliver's Travels would last to the 21st Century, in the form we know it now," says Abigail Williams, professor of English at King's College, London, who once enlisted her infant son and an FBI analyst to decrypt nonsense words in Swift's letters. "Swift intended Gulliver's Travels to be a series of topical and general satires on humankind, not a kind of adventure."

"That's the really extraordinary thing," she adds. "He's taking the mick out of [adventure stories], but takes enough energy from them that Gulliver's Travels becomes an adventure story in its own right."

- Author: Tamlin Magee, BBC

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