Name: Gulliver's Travels
Author: Jonathan Swift

Of special note is the small map of Japan bound near the end of the second voyage – the only actual country Swift includes. The chart shows the Sea of Korea and adjacent parts of Asia labelled simply as ‘Parts Unknown.’ Hokkaidō is marked as ‘Yesso,’ while the Kuril Islands appear as ‘Stats Island’ and ‘Company’s Land.’ 

To the east lie the imaginary territories of Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, and Glubbdubdrib. Swift uses this setting to lampoon the Dutch, reflecting Anglo-Dutch rivalry in overseas trade, and to allude to the persecution of Christians in Japan. Gulliver refuses to undergo the test of e-fumi, trampling on an image of Christ or the Virgin to prove he is not a Christian (a similar incident occurs in Martin Scorsese’s 2016 historical drama Silence).

Ex Carta

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels includes a small map of Japan and ‘Parts Unknown’, locating Swift’s flights of fantasy andGulliver’s absurd voyages within a recognisable geography. The chart literalises the satire’s conceit, placing imaginary islands at the periphery of Enlightenment knowledge.

This is the first edition of one of the defining works of eighteenth-century English literature. Pitched as the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, described in the subtitle as ‘First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships’. Swift’s 

 charts encounters with the peoples of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and the Houyhnhnms. Very much a product of the Enlightenment, new technologies map the universe in bewildering detail: ‘A great many Enlightenment works find the macroscopic and the microscopic to be new imaginative resources of wondrous possibility, as well as of satirical precision.’

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), born in Dublin, spent his formative years in England, working within Tory political circles until the party’s collapse in 1714. Back in Ireland he championed national rights and denounced economic exploitation, producing a body of writing that combined biting satire with moral urgency. Gulliver’s Travels was composed in this period and remains his most famous work, trenchant in its critique of political, social, and religious hypocrisy.

A satire of extraordinary versatility, Swift’s narrative functions at once as entertainment, moral fable, anti-novel, voyage imaginary, a ‘key SF text of the age’, and even a children’s classic. The text rapidly left a cultural mark: ‘Lilliputian’ entered common speech, the book was adapted into multiple forms, and its influence stretched from Enlightenment philosophy to modern genre writing. Among its most famous episodes are the journeys to Lilliput, where all is tiny, and to Brobdingnag, where all is vast – leading Gulliver to muse: ‘Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.’

 (Teerink A), issued 28 October 1726. Two further octavo editions followed swiftly: the ‘AA’ edition in November and ‘B’ in December, with the so-called ‘Second Edition’ of 1727 in fact the fourth. To counter piracy, publisher Benjamin Motte farmed out the printing to five presses (including those of Edward Say, Henry Woodfall, James Bettenham, William Pearson, and Jane Ilive). The text was subject to unauthorised alterations by Andrew Tooke, yet demand was insatiable: the edition sold out within a week. Gay reported that ‘from the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the Cabinet-council to the Nursery.’ Swift, in Ireland when it appeared, received around £200, thanks in part to Alexander Pope’s advice on prudent dealing. Whatever else Swift wrote, Gulliver’s Travels is the book by which he is chiefly remembered.

Swift’s use of successive, self-contained societies as satirical mirrors develops earlier traditions of imagined worlds found in Utopia (1516) and anticipates and influenced later extraordinary voyages such as those of 

 (1741) and by Jules Verne (1828–1905). Perhaps its most profound legacy has been in science fiction, where the conceit of creating imaginary worlds to satirise and newly-estrange our own has been applied to an interplanetary canvas in work by Ursula K. Le Guin (1928–2018) to pick just one example.

Title page with engraved portrait of Captain Lemeul Gulliver

Map showing the location of Liliput, and the proximity to Sumatra

Map of the North western coast of America showing the location of Brobdingnag

Map showing the islands of Luggnagg and Balnibardi, and their proximity to Japan

Map of the islands of Laputa and Balnibardi

Map of Houyhnhnms Land and the coast of South Australia

Of special note is the small map of Japan bound near the end of the second voyage – the only actual country Swift includes. The chart shows the Sea of Korea and adjacent parts of Asia labelled simply as ‘Parts Unknown’. Hokkaidō is marked as ‘Yesso,’ while the Kuril Islands appear as ‘Stats Island’ and ‘Company’s Land.’

To the east lie the imaginary territories of Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, and Glubbdubdrib. Swift uses this setting to lampoon the Dutch, reflecting Anglo-Dutch rivalry in overseas trade, and to allude to the persecution of Christians in Japan. Gulliver refuses to undergo the test of e-fumi, trampling on an image of Christ or the Virgin to prove he is not a Christian (a similar incident occurs in Martin Scorsese’s 2016 historical drama 