Published June 23, 2026
The great themes of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the masterpiece whose tricentenary this is, are an elaborate and pungent meditation on this exchange between Miranda and Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Wonder takes a sharp well-aimed blow from a blunt object. Awe at the marvels the world holds, gratitude for the privilege of being human, this glorious being whom God has placed at the pinnacle of earthly life, and who can take pleasure in the whole spectacle before him—a closer look at this enchantment reveals how much of it is flimflam. Disappointment, disillusion, shame, disgust, and horror sum up the shrewder assessment. And this wised-up revulsion is Swift’s hallmark. The Latin epitaph for his memorial in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where he served as dean for over thirty years, declares that he is now peacefully beyond the reach of his own saeva indignatio, the savage indignation that lacerated his heart.
Countless readers have loved Gulliver’s Travels in spite of its savagery. For many children it is the first book written for adults that they read, a treasury of fantastic exploits in an endlessly fascinating world. As one learns from Leo Damrosch’s excellent biography of Swift, frontiersman Daniel Boone read the novel aloud around the campfire to his fellow adventurers in the American wilderness. George Orwell read it many times over, and proclaimed it one of “six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed.” John Wesley found Gulliver’s description of European warlike viciousness appallingly correct: “Is it not astonishing beyond expression that this is the naked truth? . . . And meanwhile we gravely talk of the ‘dignity of our nature’ in its present state.” William Makepeace Thackeray, expert in the vanities and vices of mankind, pronounced it “filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene. . . . [T]he meaning is that man is utterly wicked, desperate, and imbecile, and his passions are so monstrous, and his boasted powers so mean, that he is and deserves to be the slave of brutes, and ignorance is better than his vaunted reason.”
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Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.
