Gulliver's Travels

The Penguin English Library Edition of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift 'Fifteen hundred of the Emperor's largest horses, each about four inches and an half high, were employed to draw me towards the Metropolis, which, as I said, was half a Mile distant' A savage and hilarious satire, Gulliver's Travels sees Lemuel Gulliver shipwrecked and adrift, subject to bizarre and unnerving encounters with, among others, quarrelling Lilliputians, philosophizing horses and the brutish Yahoo tribe, that change his view of humanity - and himself - for ever. Swift's classic of 1726 portrays mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with a comical yet uncompromising reflection of ourselves. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) somehow managed to balance his role as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin with being one of the most effective, disgusted and ferocious satirists in the English language. Gulliver's Travels is both a parody of what Swift viewed as the ridiculously contrived exotic travel genre pioneered by writers such as Captain William Dampier and an incomparably vivid and funny narrative that lies at the very heart of early English fiction.