Page 74 - Gullivers

interpret the text in that they show what people and places looked like without enlarging too much on Swift’s own quite visual text; in this they illuminate rather than expand his words in the manner of a true picturebook. Perhaps Swift’s fertile imagination is sufficiently rich to need little embellishment. F.J. Harvey Darton, who edited the volume illustrated by René Bull, comments in his introduction that ‘Gulliver’s bubbles have not burst [referring to the South Sea Bubble which burst circa 20 years after Gulliver’s voyages]. Though fictitious, they are too true to break, and even if they were not, they make so real a picture that they cannot be pricked’.
Most of the illustrators discussed make Gulliver look like a real individual rather than a caricature, even when, as in Horst Lemke’s and Hans Baltzer’s drawings he is a cartoon-like character. Many artists have been unable to resist romanticising him; mostly he is shown with dark hair, firm jaw, and in some case striking good looks, while J. J. Grandville,Alexander King and V.A. Poirson show an earthier, more bucolic surgeon, and unusually, Poirson’s Gulliver is blond. A.E. Jackson’s Gulliver looks quite effeminate at times; something
played up when, unusually among the illustrators of Gulliver’s Travels, he shows Don Pedro taking leave of Gulliver. True to the text, Don Pedro is shown embracing Gulliver, leaning in towards him, while Gulliver who ‘bore [this] as well I could’ keeps his arms straight by his side and looks prim. The rather girlish good looks of R.G. Mossa’s Gulliver is intensified in some scenes: we observe Gulliver dancing in Lilliput and carefully taking off his stockings before he enters the sea, and elsewhere gazing dreamily over Lilliput. Even when he is pulling the boats to Lilliput, he looks more like an eager boy than a qualified doctor and a husband.
Generally, illustrators have chosen
to stick to a late seventeenth- or eighteenth-century setting of Gulliver’s Travels, and he is shown dressed more
or less appropriately for the period,
unlike other classic stories, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where period setting varies in illustrated versions. Perhaps the supposedly factual narration of Gulliver’s journeys imposes a desire
to further the notion of authenticity on the part of illustrators, and the places visited by Gulliver do allow for imaginative visual play, even while remaining faithful to
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