Page 108 - Gullivers

and facilitate the re-colonisation of Blefuscu, as he dœs not wish to play a part
in turning a brave people into slaves. Jenkins keeps the anti-colonial message of Swist’s original. There is treachery and small-mindedness in Lilliput and Gulliver reaches a new understanding of ‘how treacherous courts and ministers could be’.
In the episode where Gulliver urinates on the empress’s apartments to extinguish a fire the synergy between text and image is striking. The illustration, showing Gulliver’s back, his head partially turned back revealing a single slightly scared eye against lurid flaming sky, the shocked empress, and the stunned birds is a wonderful comic gloss on the economy and restraint of the text (p.36, 37).
The sexual humour of the alleged affair between Gulliver and the treasurer’s wife is preserved in Jenkins’ version. ‘It has been said that the treasurer’s wife
took something of a fancy to me and even visited me alone in secret’ (p.40).
In a number of tiny visual details, such as Gulliver’s and the treasurer’s wife’s possession of each other’s portrait, it is suggested that this comic unequal relationship is less innocent than Gulliver admits when he insists that when visiting him she was always chaperoned by her sister or daughter. It is above all
in the Lilliput book that children’s illustrators have traditionally exploited the possibilities of perspective, of proportionality, a response to which is implicit in the Jane Eyre quotation mentioned earlier. However because of the comic cartoon nature of Riddell’s illustration there is very little continuous sense of perspective. There is instead a series of direct and varying contrasts between big and little.
In book two, the voyage to Brobdingnag, Jenkins’ narrative again stays very close to Swist’s. In Swist’s original Gulliver frequently experiences the world as
a child might do: finding himself dressed, fed, nursed, tended, petted, neglected and abused, by the giants in the arbitrary way that children are frequently treated by adults. Jenkins’ narrative allows the reader to identify with Gulliver’s powerlessness as it dœs with Gulliver’s terror and courage when threatened by
a series of giant animals that distinguish this book, ranging from the initial giant cat, through to the rat, spaniel, monkey, frog, and giant wasps until he is finally
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