AP Success - AP English Language: The Meaning of Gulliver's Travels

The most obvious joke in the title of Swift’s Travels into

Several Remote Nations of the World is that what purports

to be a chronicle of several excursions to remote nations

turns out to be a satiric anatomy of specifically English

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attitudes and values. But there is a second joke. Many of

the…supposedly unfamiliar and exotic sights Gulliver sees

in his sixteen years and seven months of wandering in

remote nations, and even the radically altered perspectives

from which he sees them (as diminutive landscapes, giant

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people, intelligent animals, etc.), could have been seen or

experienced in a few days by anyone at the tourists’ sights,

public entertainments, shows, spectacles, and exhibitions in

the streets and at the fairs of London.

It is not surprising that Gulliver’s Travels should be

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filled with the shows and diversions of London. All the

Scriblerians were fascinated with popular entertainments;

collectively and individually, they satirized them in many

of their works. Swift shared this fascination with his fellow

Scriblerians, and he transforms the sights and shows of

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London into an imaginative center of Gulliver’s Travels.1

Gulliver himself senses that the wonders he sees in

remote nations resemble popular entertainments back home

in England when he notes that the capital city of Lilliput

“looked like the painted Scene of a City in a Theatre.”1

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 And

other popular entertainments would allow Londoners to see

many of the same sights Gulliver saw in Lilliput. A Londoner

could experience what a miniature city looked like to the

giant Gulliver by going to see the papier-mâché and clay

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architectural and topographical models displayed at fairs and

in inns, some of which were extraordinarily elaborate and

detailed, such as the model of Amsterdam exhibited in 1710,

which was twenty feet wide and twenty to thirty feet long,

“with all the Churches, Chappels, Stadt house, Hospitals,

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noble Buildings, Streets, Trees, Walks, Avenues, with the

Sea, Shipping, Sluices, Rivers, Canals &c., most exactly built

to admiration.”2

Miniature people, as well as miniature landscapes, could

be seen in one of the most popular diversions in London, the

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peepshows, which were enclosed boxes containing scenes

made out of painted board, paper flats, and glass panels

and given the illusion of depth by mirrors and magnifying

glasses. All of this was seen through a hole bored in one side.

Among the most popular scenes were interiors, particularly

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palace interiors of European royalty, and so there is a direct

analogy between peering in the hole of a peepshow and

Gulliver’s looking into the palace in Lilliput: “I applied my

Face to the Windows of the middle Stories, and discovered

the most splendid Apartments that can be imagined. There

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I saw the Empress, and the young Princes in their several

Lodgings. Her Imperial Majesty was pleased to smile very

graciously upon me, and gave me out the window her Hand

to kiss.” The queen’s movements could have been seen in

the peepshows, too, for clockwork animating the figures was

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introduced early in the century. And much the same illusion

of a living, miniature world could be found in another

popular diversion, the “moving picture,” a device in which

cutout figures were placed within a frame and activated by

jacks and wheels. This curiosity fascinated contemporary

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Londoners: “The landscape looks as an ordinary picture till

the clock-work behind the curtain be set at work, and then

the ships move and sail distinctly upon the sea till out of

sight; a coach comes out of town, the motion of the horses

and wheels are very distinct, and a gentleman in the coach

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that salutes the company; a hunter also and his dogs keep

their course till out of sight.” Swift saw this same moving

picture, or one very much like it, and was impressed.

1 Gulliver’s Travels, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert

Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1939–68), XI:13

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2 Quoted in John Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne (New

York: Chatto and Windus, 1883), 219–20