Page 15 - Gullivers

Why then, we might ask, dœs Swist’s most celebrated work, Travels through Several Remote Nations of the World (1726) – better known as Gulliver’s Travels – both begin and end in London? Why should Lemuel Gulliver have lived
in Redriff and not Ringsend? Why did Swist make the first of his two visits to England in the 1720s for the specific purpose of taking with him to London the manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels, in order to arrange for its publication in the English capital? The answers to these questions must be sought both in the values of the literary culture in which Swist had been educated, and in elements of his own personal psychology.
Throughout much of his life, Swist showed a very real engagement with the city in which he had been born and in which he would eventually die. That engagement was both with the physical realities of contemporary Dublin and with the ways in which the capital’s changing fabric might be turned
into an imaginative moral landscape. As we have seen, in ‘The Legion Club’ Dublin becomes an emblematic space in which the attributes of a great city – understood as the location of political power, religion, learning, and art – are perverted by impotent, irreligious, ignorant, barbaric politicians, leading the writer in his gloomier moments to characterise the Irish capital as ‘wretched Dublin, in miserable Ireland’.
Rocque Map 1756
I. Swist and Dublin
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