AP Success - AP English Language: The Meaning of Gulliver's Travels

The most obvious joke in the title of Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World is that what purports to be a chronicle of several excursions to remote nations turns out to be a satiric anatomy of specifically English attitudes and values. But there is a second joke. Many of the…supposedly unfamiliar and exotic sights Gulliver sees in his sixteen years and seven months of wandering in remote nations, and even the radically altered perspectives from which he sees them (as diminutive landscapes, giant people, intelligent animals, etc.), could have been seen or experienced in a few days by anyone at the tourists’ sights, public entertainments, shows, spectacles, and exhibitions in the streets and at the fairs of London. It is not surprising that Gulliver’s Travels should be filled with the shows and diversions of London. All the Scriblerians were fascinated with popular entertainments; collectively and individually, they satirized them in many of their works. Swift shared this fascination with his fellow Scriblerians, and he transforms the sights and shows of London into an imaginative center of Gulliver’s Travels.1 Gulliver himself senses that the wonders he sees in remote nations resemble popular entertainments back home in England when he notes that the capital city of Lilliput “looked like the painted Scene of a City in a Theatre.”1 And other popular entertainments would allow Londoners to see many of the same sights Gulliver saw in Lilliput. A Londoner could experience what a miniature city looked like to the giant Gulliver by going to see the papier-mâché and clay architectural and topographical models displayed at fairs and in inns, some of which were extraordinarily elaborate and detailed, such as the model of Amsterdam exhibited in 1710, which was twenty feet wide and twenty to thirty feet long, “with all the Churches, Chappels, Stadt house, Hospitals, noble Buildings, Streets, Trees, Walks, Avenues, with the Sea, Shipping, Sluices, Rivers, Canals &c., most exactly built to admiration.”2 Miniature people, as well as miniature landscapes, could be seen in one of the most popular diversions in London, the peepshows, which were enclosed boxes containing scenes made out of painted board, paper flats, and glass panels and given the illusion of depth by mirrors and magnifying glasses. All of this was seen through a hole bored in one side. Among the most popular scenes were interiors, particularly palace interiors of European royalty, and so there is a direct analogy between peering in the hole of a peepshow and Gulliver’s looking into the palace in Lilliput: “I applied my Face to the Windows of the middle Stories, and discovered the most splendid Apartments that can be imagined. There I saw the Empress, and the young Princes in their several Lodgings. Her Imperial Majesty was pleased to smile very graciously upon me, and gave me out the window her Hand to kiss.” The queen’s movements could have been seen in the peepshows, too, for clockwork animating the figures was introduced early in the century. And much the same illusion of a living, miniature world could be found in another popular diversion, the “moving picture,” a device in which cutout figures were placed within a frame and activated by jacks and wheels. This curiosity fascinated contemporary Londoners: “The landscape looks as an ordinary picture till the clock-work behind the curtain be set at work, and then the ships move and sail distinctly upon the sea till out of sight; a coach comes out of town, the motion of the horses and wheels are very distinct, and a gentleman in the coach that salutes the company; a hunter also and his dogs keep their course till out of sight.” Swift saw this same moving picture, or one very much like it, and was impressed. 1 Gulliver’s Travels, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1939–68), XI:13 2 Quoted in John Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne (New York: Chatto and Windus, 1883), 219–20