Page 99 - Gullivers

Riddell’s comments in this interview indicate that in his view there dœs not need to be a match between text and illustration: that images are not there to advance the narrative, but to amuse; that they need not be viewed sequentially. In essence what Riddell is doing is akin to certain features of jazz in music.
He provides comic improvisations and variations on themes and images from Swist to accompany Jenkins’ text. That means that the illustrations are not strictly in the service of the story.
All four books of Swist’s original are substantially represented here. Although this version is not unique in giving all four sections (Gulliver’s Travels Adapted for the Young, W.B. Scott, illustrated by A.E. Jackson, 1911, also gave all four books) the more usual retellings for children concentrate on the first two books only.
In Swist’s original work his narrator, Gulliver, sustains his role convincingly because he is a plain man, a surgeon and sailor who takes the world more
or less as he finds it, whose needs are simple and basic, who is not driven by curiosity or imagination or even by ambition but by a certain restlessness, a need to escape his wife and family. His prose is simple, and for much of the time, spare. The effect of that very plainness has been to convince readers that they are reading something close to the unadorned truth. In Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, (chapter 3) Jane, another rather plain narrator, recounts her childhood responses to Gulliver’s story. It is likely that Jane has been reading a children’s illustrated version, since she discusses only the first two books, those which were most frequently adapted for children. She mentions that she responded as if to
a work of realism, seeing the landscape and animals and human figures as actual and Lilliput and Brobdingnag as countries she might visit some day. ‘This book
I had again and again perused with delight. I considered it a narrative of facts and discovered in it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales’. Perhaps because Jane herself has just been through a major psychological crisis, she also now responds to the darker aspects of Swist’s book, however, seeing Gulliver as,
‘a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions’.
V. Jonathan Swist’s Gulliver, 2004 93