Page 43 - Gullivers

Swift Portrait
life close to the centre of court and city life in London to the provincial world of Dublin, rewarded not with the English bishopric he so earnestly desired but with the much less glamorous position of Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Instead of enjoying scintillating London society, Swift suddenly found himself, at the age of 46, back in Ireland, a place he considered an intellectual backwater; he was forced to create company for himself and to spend time with clergymen, schoolmasters and tradesmen’s wives rather than with duchesses and Privy Councillors. But within a few years, this restless man overcame the depression which initially afflicted him and found an outlet for his literary energy by writing pamphlets attacking the way Ireland was governed
by the English-appointed administration and by its own Parliament. These pamphlets (the most famous of which were The Drapier’s Letters) were remarkably successful; they wounded the government and endeared him to the people of Ireland. He became known as the Irish ‘patriot’ and was soon a revered and respected figure in Ireland, welcomed home from England in 1727 by cheering crowds as bonfires blazed on every street.
It seems that Swift began working seriously on his ‘Travels’ early in the 1720s, writing at least some of the text while staying with friends in the Irish countryside. He had always been
a voracious reader, fond (among other things) of books of travel and history.
We do not know how or when the basic idea for Gulliver’s Travels came to him, though we do know that he was at work on the book by 1721 when he told his friend Charles Ford that he was ‘writing
a History of my Travells, which will be a large Volume and gives Account of Countryes hitherto unknown’; some critics believe the idea first came to him when he was still in London long before this. But once Swift had created a voice for Gulliver and hit upon the idea of changing viewpoints by changing Gulliver’s size in the first two books of the work, he had found the ideal recipe for a powerful satire on the human condition, wrapped in an entertaining travelogue: in this format,
the creatures Gulliver encountered in
the four books of the work could describe his behaviour (and therefore that of all humans) objectively – without sympathy or understanding of the human predicament – while Gulliver himself