Page 53 - Gullivers

Scholars were taken utterly by surprise in 2005 to discover that John Gulliver, son
of the Lemuel Gulliver whose fame rests on his fantastic voyages, had recorded an account, however tantalisingly brief, of his childhood. Dated 1760, this highly personal and frank testimony was written in his careful, copperplate hand and was discovered inserted between the leaves of a first edition of Gulliver’s Travels in the basement
of a house in Rotherhithe, Southwark, South London. It is likely that John Gulliver
(if it is indeed he who wrote the account that follows – not all scholars are convinced
of the authenticity of the account) was in his early sixties when he committed his
story to paper. The trustworthiness of the details of his memory may therefore be open to question, although the strength of emotion suggests some degree of reliability.
Little enough had been known heretofore about John Gulliver, except that he became governor of a workhouse and a minor government advisor, and in later life, was ordained a minister of the Church of England. He never married, but the scholar Faulkner Motte suggests that he may have had long relationships with two women, one considerably younger than himself. It seems that he disapproved of his sister Betty’s marriage, which he considered beneath her, and he bequeathed the bulk of
his tidy fortune towards building a bedlam institute. He also lest sufficient funds
to his housekeeper’s children to enable them to complete their education. A scholarly appraisal of the edited and transcribed account reproduced here may be found in Faulkner Motte, ‘An assessment of the provenance and reliability of John Gulliver’s Notes from a Journal’, The International Journal of Gulliver Studies, vol. 17 (26), October (2005), pp 45-60.
III. Lemuel Gulliver’s Children 47