Page 38 - Gullivers

itself; it will encourage us into new ways
of seeing ourselves and our own world.
In effect, our experience of this book leads us to question the way we see ourselves, and we find ourselves perceiving the world and its inhabitants from at least
two perspectives at once; humans are both very large and very small, very wise and very foolish. We begin to develop
new (and, incidentally, profoundly ‘moral’) ways of interpreting human behaviour;
we learn about ourselves, in fact – which is an excellent way of spending our time on the desert island.
Jonathan Swift (the man who, we
now know, wrote Gulliver’s Travels) was
a troubled man, subjected, throughout
his long life, to conflicting and confusing experiences. He was born in Ireland in 1667 to a Protestant English couple who had come to predominantly Catholic Ireland to make a living. Swift’s father died before he was born and his nurse seems to have removed him from his mother and taken him to England for a formative period of his young life. But he then returned to Ireland and was educated at a boarding school with the sons of Anglo- Irish gentry in what was a profoundly ambiguous social, religious and political
scene. During the 1670s and 1680s –
a complex and shifting time in Ireland’s history – Catholics, members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, Presbyterians, native Irish, Old English and New English competed with each other for religious freedom, for political power, for the right to own Irish land or, indeed, for their
very survival. By the time Swift became
a student at Trinity College Dublin in his teens, confusion, double-thinking and self- deception were deeply ingrained into Irish political and religious life: towards the
end of Swift’s time at Trinity, the Protestant Church of Ireland and its establishment was (unenthusiastically) supporting the newly-crowned Catholic King James rather than the man who had unseated him in England, his Protestant son-in-law,William of Orange; but James, having abandoned his English throne, came to Ireland with a French/Irish Catholic army to protect his Irish throne from William, who had brought his Protestant army to the North of Ireland to drive James out of Ireland. It was a time of extreme tension, and who would be the ‘real’ king of Ireland – and what would be its official religion – depended simply on which side defeated the other. The decisive battle was the
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