Political Significance of Gulliver’s Travel's Book 1.
Discuss the political significance of Gulliver’s Travel's Book 1.
Irish writer and clergyman, Jonathan Swift was born in an age of “The Satirist”. His novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726, amended in 1735), regarded as the best among his full-length works, is treated as both a satire on human nature, party politics and religious differences, and a parody of the “traveller’s tales”. Therefore, the story of A Voyage to Lilliput is looked upon as a political allegory in which the relationship among the Lilliputians and the events they are involved in provide us with a political history of the early eighteenth century, between 1708 and the early 1720s. In the words of C. H. Firth, “Swift is telling a story which began in the reign of Anne and ended in that of George I.”
The story begins with Gulliver finding himself stranded on an island and waking up to “hundred arrows discharged on my left hand, which pricked me like so many needles; and besides, they shot another flight into the air, as we do bombs in Europe”. Gulliver throughout his stay at Lilliput draws comparison between the land of Lilliput and England in terms of the way of governance and lifestyle. There are several differences that Gullivers observes that differ the Lilliputians from the English. Lilliputtians viewed fraud as a greater crime than theft, the ones who followed the laws was rewarded, they gave more regard to morals rather than to great abilities in choosing persons for all employment, also those who did not believe in Divine Providence were rendered from holding any public station; they treated ingratitude as a capital crime; they do not differentiate in the education of men and women, and women are equally liable to be cowards and fools as men; begging in Lilliput is unknown, they regard it as highly unjust of people who bring their children in subservience to their own appetites and leave them as a burden on the public to support them.
Lilliputians ‘just under six inches tall, hold up a kind
Irish writer and clergyman, Jonathan Swift was born in an age of “The Satirist”. His novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726, amended in 1735), regarded as the best among his full-length works, is treated as both a satire on human nature, party politics and religious differences, and a parody of the “traveller’s tales”. Therefore, the story of A Voyage to Lilliput is looked upon as a political allegory in which the relationship among the Lilliputians and the events they are involved in provide us with a political history of the early eighteenth century, between 1708 and the early 1720s. In the words of C. H. Firth, “Swift is telling a story which began in the reign of Anne and ended in that of George I.”
The story begins with Gulliver finding himself stranded on an island and waking up to “hundred arrows discharged on my left hand, which pricked me like so many needles; and besides, they shot another flight into the air, as we do bombs in Europe”. Gulliver throughout his stay at Lilliput draws comparison between the land of Lilliput and England in terms of the way of governance and lifestyle. There are several differences that Gullivers observes that differ the Lilliputians from the English. Lilliputtians viewed fraud as a greater crime than theft, the ones who followed the laws was rewarded, they gave more regard to morals rather than to great abilities in choosing persons for all employment, also those who did not believe in Divine Providence were rendered from holding any public station; they treated ingratitude as a capital crime; they do not differentiate in the education of men and women, and women are equally liable to be cowards and fools as men; begging in Lilliput is unknown, they regard it as highly unjust of people who bring their children in subservience to their own appetites and leave them as a burden on the public to support them.
Lilliputians ‘just under six inches tall, hold up a kind