Page 73 - Gullivers

Did Jonathan Swift realise what a legacy he would leave when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels? It has been translated into
many languages, the terms ‘Lilliput’ and ‘Lilliputian’ have entered the vocabulary of people who have probably never even heard of Swift, and anyone referred to as a ‘yahoo’ knows it is not flattering. The bizarre adventures of the prosaic English surgeon, Lemuel Gulliver,
have amused and entranced for nearly
300 years, stretching imagination and summoning mental pictures of places
and people that are probably, in the most literal sense, outside the wildest dreams of most people. But it takes no imaginative leap to grasp that Swift’s accounts of
the places visited by Gulliver are fertile material for artists. The earliest editions were illustrated by a portrait of
Lemuel Gulliver and maps, supposedly providing credence for his voyages. Then simple wood-block illustration began to appear, in the style of the late 1700s and early nineteenth century,
but once the means of illustrating books became more sophisticated as the nineteenth century progressed, artists began with gusto to mine the possibilities presented by Swift.
This article discusses some of the better known, and a few lesser-known, illustrated volumes of Gulliver’s Travels. It is by no means a survey, nor is it completely comprehensive. That would require a book to itself in that there are well over a hundred illustrated editions, ranging from the ‘arty’ collectors’ items, a few of which are discussed below, to simplified versions, often crudely illustrated, some of which are firmly aimed at schools’ markets. One thing is sure though: this story of a man cast into strange worlds, sometimes a giant and sometimes diminutive, sometimes a semi-civilised creature, a man coping with extraordinary circumstances, which in his fumbling way, he tries to rationalise, has an enduring power over its readers.
Illustrations of the story vary from interpretations by some of the great illustrators of the past 200 years – Rackham, Pogány, Bawden and many
more - to hack work provided for cheap editions, often simple retellings specifically for children. According to Humphrey Carpenter, one of the first editions for children was published by Benjamin Tabert in London in 1805, with three coloured copperplates. The majority of illustrators of Gulliver’s Travels represent rather than
René Bull
IV. Picturing Gulliver
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