Gulliver 300

Still relevant after all these years!

On Friday, 28th October 1726 the Daily Journal carried an advertisement that ‘This day is published Travels into several remote nations of the world by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon afterwards captain of several ships.’ This book is now universally known simply as Gulliver’s Travels.

Vintage colour illustration from Gulliver's travels.

The first leather-bound, two-volume edition of Gulliver’s Travels was priced at the rather expensive price of 8 shillings and 5 pence. This would have been more than two weeks wages for an unskilled labourer. Today copies of the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels sell for many thousands of euros.

The Travels purported to recount the adventures, observations, and the knowledge gained, over the course of four voyages to ‘remote nations’ spread over a period of sixteen years, by the hitherto unknown Lemuel Gulliver.

Advertisement for Travels into several remote nations of the world by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon and then a captain of several ships
Daily Journal, 28 October 1726.

Interior of a London Coffee House c. 1705

Modern readers know that Lemuel Gulliver was not the author of Gulliver’s Travels. We know that he is a fictional character. We also know that, except for Japan, none of the lands, described in the Travels exist. Despite some hints, it was not clear to the first readers that the Travels was a work of imaginative fiction. However, within weeks (almost) everyone knew that the real author of the Travels was the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral of the Church of Ireland in Dublin.

Swift went to great lengths to hide his authorship of the Travels. He had his manuscript of 100,000 words transcribed by another person so that the printer and the authorities would not recognize his handwriting.

Swift sold the English copyright to the Travels to the leading London printer Mr. Benjamin Motte for £200. This was the only occasion in Swift's writing career for which he was paid a fee. The final text was surreptitiously delivered to Motte in the dead of the night and when later challenged Motte could ‘plausibly deny’ that he had any knowledge of the identity of the author.

The map of Brobdingnag from Book 2 of Gulliver’s travels purports to locate it somewhere off the North American coast.

Title page of the first edition of Travels into several remote nations of the world by Lemuel Gulliver...
Benjamin Motte, London, 1726. Source: The British Library.

Within days Gulliver’s Travels was a best-seller. On the 7 November Swift’s close friend, the poet and dramatist John Gay, informed him that:

about ten days ago a Book was publish’d here of the Travels of one Gulliver, which hath been the conversation of the whole town ever since: The whole impression sold in a week … ’Tis generally said that you are the Author, but I am told, the Bookseller declares he knows not from what hand it came. From the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the Cabinet-council to the nursery.

By the end of 1726 Motte had issued a second impression of the Travels and a ‘pirated’ edition had been published in Dublin by John Hyde.

Gullivers Travels is often mistakenly regarded as a children’s classic; in reality it is a savage critique of human political and personal pettiness, delusional pride, and moral degeneracy.

Title page of the 1726 Dublin edition of Gulliver’s Travels
“In this impression, several errors in the London edition are corrected”.

Bindon portrait of Swift, in the National Gallery of Ireland

Jonathan Swift the man

The Reverend Dr Jonathan Swift was an ordained clergyman of the Church of Ireland, a reformed Protestant Church within the global Anglican communion. Except for Gulliver’s Travels, Swift was never paid for any of his vast output across a variety of literary genres including prose, journalism, political pamphlets, comic poems, and poetry.

Jonathan Swift was born on 30 November 1667 at Hoey’s Court Dublin, a small lane near Dublin Castle, the centre of English government in Ireland. Swift’s mother, while born in Dublin, was the daughter of English parents and Swift’s father was an Englishman who had migrated to Ireland in the 1650s. He was a first-generation son of migrants.

Swift received his early education in Kilkenny College before taking his degree at Trinity College Dublin. Swift moved to England during the Williamite War in Ireland (1689-92).

A nineteenth-century image of the house (long since demolished) where Swift was born, Hoey’s Court Dublin.

While in England he became the secretary for the retired diplomat Sir William Temple, a relative of his mother. In 1695 Swift returned to Ireland where he was ordained a priest of the Church of Ireland. He took up his first clerical appointment in a rural parish near Belfast. He hated it and only remained for a year. In 1700, he took an MA in Oxford and was granted a doctorate by Trinity College Dublin. His next church appointment was as the vicar of a parish about 40 km west of Dublin. This modest appointment was much more to his liking, but it was hardly likely to fully occupy his mind and talents.

In 1710 he was recruited to write political pamphlets and journal articles for the new Tory government in England. In 1711 Swift published a pamphlet, Conduct of the Allies, which prepared English public opinion to accept the terms of the imminent treaty of Utrecht which ended the long-running and bloody war of Spanish Succession. In the spring of 1713 and as a reward for these, entirely unpaid, services Swift was appointed to the prestigious post of dean of St Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin.

St Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin in 1739
The spire which is now a recognised feature of Dublin’s skyline was built in the 1750s about a decade after Swift’s death.

The only contemporary image of Swift’s deanery, St Kevin’s Street, Dublin.

Title page of The Conduct of the Allies, and of the Late Ministry, in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War
1712 edition. CCI Old Library.

Title page of Proposal for the universal use of Irish manufacture
This publication marked his first public intervention into Irish politics.

In 1714 the death of Queen Anne and the arrival of a new Whig regime in England meant that the possibility of any further advancement in the church was gone forever. Swift and his Tory political mentors were excluded from power for two generations.

Despite his declared intention of not becoming involved in politics the draw of the public sphere was simply too strong for him. During the 1720s and 1730s Swift wrote a series of pamphlets on Irish politics, church affairs, and what he claimed was the mismanagement of Ireland from London. These campaigns included his 1720 pamphlet for the universal use of Irish manufactures with its memorably satiric proposal ‘to burn everything that came from England except its people and its coals’.

The high point of his Irish campaigning was the Modest Proposal of 1729 which recommended that the solution to Ireland’s endemic poverty was for the poor of Ireland to sell their children as food for the rich landlord class. The Modest Proposal is widely recognised as one of the most biting satires ever written, with its searing criticism of elite inaction in the face of clear and obvious distress.

St Patrick’s Mental Health Services.

It was in this period, at the height of his fame in Ireland, that Swift completed Gulliver’s Travels in early 1726 at the age of 59. During the 1730s, Swift devoted considerable energy to developing his final project, Ireland’s first mental health hospital to be funded on his death by his legacy of £15,000 (over €6m in today’s money). He memorably joked about the gift in Verses on the Death of Dr Swift, which in essence was his own elegy:

He gave the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad;
And show'd by one satiric touch,
No nation wanted it so much.

There are no fully authenticated images of Stella and Vanessa although this image claimed to be made from a contemporary portrait.

Swift never married. However, he was ‘involved’ with two women. Esther Johnson, whom he called Stella. He met her as a young girl when he was her tutor at Sir William Temple’s house in England in the 1690s. She followed him to Ireland in 1704 and remained there for the rest of her life. Swift wrote daily letters to her during his three years stay in London, 1710-13. These letters are now known as The Journal to Stella. Stella died in 1728.

The second woman in Swift’s life was Esther Van Homrigh, whom he called Vanessa. She was born in Dublin but Swift only met her when he was in London in the 1710-14 period. The exact nature of their relationship remains unclear. She also followed him back to Ireland. Vanessa died in 1723. Apparently, Stella and Vanessa never met.

Highly romanticised Victorian image of the final purportedly traumatic meeting between Swift and Vanessa in 1723. She died shortly afterwards.

Reading Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver’s Travels remains an engaging, complex, comic, and deeply unsettling read. At first glance Gulliver’s Travels appears to be a work of comedy, replete with ludicrous, even slapstick, incidents; our hero Lemuel Gulliver encounters little people, large people, a flying island, and talking horses. For much of the past three centuries it has been presented (first in books, and then in comics, movies and cartoons) as a children’s adventure story, but it was not aimed at children. Gulliver’s Travels is a political and social satire, but we can also appreciate it as an early example of fantasy fiction, or even of science fiction.

By the early 1720s, Swift was searching for a suitable vehicle to further the ‘Universal Improvement of Mankind’, and he lit upon the idea of writing a satiric novel in the form of a travelogue which recounted the experiences of his titular hero in a series of visits to remote nations of the world. In 1725 Swift confided to his friend the influential English poet Alexander Pope that

the chief end … in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it.

When reading Gulliver’s Travels, it can be difficult to separate the voice of Gulliver from the voice of the often vexatious and angry real author, Dr Jonathan Swift. The sections below set out, not only the familiar comic elements of Gulliver’s Travels, but also Swift’s thinly disguised, key political, social, and cultural messages. They show his anti-war and anti-colonial principles, his pessimistic view of human nature and on the limits of human rationality. For Swift, human rationality was a God-given gift, one that it was incumbent on us to use wisely. The flaws of humanity, for Swift, were a real-world manifestation of original sin.

Portrait of a young Gulliver with the title Splendide Mendax – Splendidly False, from the 1735 Dublin edition of Swift’s collected works printed by George Faulkner, which incorporated Swift’s final changes and alterations to Gulliver’s Travels.

Book I: Voyage to Lilliput

Book I of Gulliver’s Travels, The Voyage to Lilliput, is the best known and the most frequently illustrated part of Gulliver’s Travels.

In Lilliput, Gulliver is a giant and the natives are diminutive. The empire of Lilliput is governed by a petty, power-mad, autocrat. It is also embroiled in a forever war with its neighbour empire of Blefuscu. When Gulliver assists the Lilliputians by capturing half of the Blefuscan fleet, the emperor, with what Gulliver terms the ‘unmeasurable … ambition of princes’, tasks Gulliver with capturing the remainder of the Blefuscan ships so that Lilliput can reduce ‘the whole empire of Blefuscu into a province, and governing it, by a viceroy’.

Effectively, the emperor wants to turn Gulliver into an instrument of colonial oppression, or what we might now call a weapon of mass destruction. Gulliver is often presented by Swift as a shallow, credulous, and self-aggrandizing figure, motivated by wanderlust and in pursuit of his own self-interest. However, on this occasion Gulliver displays commendable fortitude, when he declines and declares that ‘I would never be an instrument of bringing a free and brave people into slavery’. He further declares ‘And, when the matter was debated in council, the wisest part of the ministry were of my opinion’. Swift is reminding us of our tendency to obey orders when faced with overweening authority. He is challenging us to do better.

Map of Lilliput and Blefescu from the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels. Source: The British Library

The image of a giant capturing a fleet of ships has been used in political contexts as in this example showing the British capture of the Danish fleet in Copenhagen in 1807.

Illustration of Gulliver pulling the Blefuscan ships by the leading French book illustrator Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, using the pseudonym J. J. Grandville (1838).

The image of Gulliver tied down on the beach surrounded by tiny figures is one of the most familiar images in western visual culture.
This 1830s image of the Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell, tied down by malevolent puny forces of resistance and reaction is a classic example.

Lilliput is riven by a long-running political and religious civil war that centres on which end to break one’s egg at breakfast. The dispute between the Big Endians and the Little Endians is clearly a reference to interdenominational Christian disputes.

Following an unfortunate injury to a prince while he was cracking his egg at the larger end, the emperor has commanded henceforth, on pain of death, that all the subjects of Lilliput should crack their egg at the smaller end. Gulliver reports

It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy.

Swift’s clear message is that religious disputes should not lead to schism and war.

The dispute between the Big Endians and the Little Endians

Book II: Voyage to Brobdingnag

In The Voyage to Brobdingnag, the scale perspective is reversed; Gulliver is now tiny and the inhabitants of Brobdingnag are giants. Swift takes full advantage of the comic potential of this scenario.

In Brobdingnag, Gulliver is subject to a series of comic mishaps which artists have had great fun illustrating. The dangers include having to fight off rats, frogs, wasps, dogs, hawks, and monkeys.

The Brobdingnagians cannot decide whether Gulliver is an insignificant animal, a toy, or just a freak of nature. In the first few weeks of his stay in Brobdingnag Gulliver is almost worked to death as a public spectacle in a freak show only to be finally liberated when he is bought (like a slave) by the queen, who then treats him as a form of court pet for her personal amusement. The Brobdingnagians even debate if it would be possible to breed a race of small people who could carry out tasks where such small scale would be advantageous. Much to Gulliver’s relief the scheme is abandoned, for reasons of practicality and not for reasons of principle.

Map of Brobdingnag from the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels. Source: The British Library

Illustration of Gulliver fighting off the wasps.
Arthur Rackham 1899.

The same scene illustrated by Grandville, 1838.

To compensate for his diminutive physical status and the intellectual distain of the Brobdingnagians – how can such a tiny puny creature be taken seriously? - Gulliver ‘ingratiates’ himself with the king by telling exaggerated tales of English and European prowess in what he termed ‘the most advantageous light’: in other words, lying. Gulliver tops off one such speech with a grotesque, bloodthirsty, and callous description of the destructive power of gunpowder, hitherto unknown to the Brobdingnagians. The formerly peace-loving Gulliver has now been transformed into a warmonger. Gulliver describes how cannons could ‘batter down the walls of the strongest town in his dominions in a few hours, or destroy the whole metropolis, if ever it should pretend to dispute his absolute commands’.

The king is horrified. ‘I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth’. Gulliver is shocked at this attack, which he declares is due to ‘miserable effects of a confined education’ and a result of ‘a strange effect of narrow principles and views’.

Gulliver’s arrival in Brobdingnag
Illustration from 1864.

Source: The British Library.

The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver: Swift's Gulliver Voyage to Brobdingnag.
Print, copy by Charles Turner after Gillray. George III is represented as the "King of Brobdingnag" and a miniscule General Napoleon in the role of "Gulliver".
See on Gallica

Book III: Voyages to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubdubdrib and Japan

Book III is almost always excluded from children’s versions of the Travels. The central themes of this section of the novel are human pride, hubris, and our failure to foresee the inevitable limits to human rationality.

Gulliver arrives in Laputa, a flying island governed by a leadership cadre who are taken up with their philosophical musings and astronomical speculations.

Illustration of the Flying Island by Grandville, 1838.

Map of Laputa from first edition of Gulliver’s Travels.

Laputa by Grandville, 1838.

The British Library.

The Flappers
by illustrator Arthur Rackham, 1899.

They are so abstracted from reality that they are accompanied by servants called Flappers who must tap them on the shoulder to draw their minds back to the real world. Laputa is a tyrannical regime that dominates and ruthlessly colonially exploits their subject lands below them on the surface of the earth. At the first signs of resistance the flying island hovers over the rebel city, threatens to crush it, or drop great stones on it from the air (carpet bombing of civilian areas), and to block out the sun thereby depriving the territory below of lifegiving warmth and rain.

Gulliver soon gets bored with the elite of Laputa and he journeys onwards to other lands. In another masterful set piece, Gulliver visits the Academy of Lagado where he encounters a series of mad scientists. Their harebrained projects include a scheme to recover sunlight from cucumbers and to reconstitute food from human excrement. One of the projectors in the academy is aiming to devise a new system for preparing land for cultivation by disturbing the ground prior to sowing. Swift, a keen gardener, thinks that this is a foolish idea, although it is actually very beneficial to the soil.

For Swift, the only sane person in these lands is Lord Munodi. He embodies all that Swift admired – stability, conservative social views, a distrust of false expertise and human hubris. As a result, Lord Munodi’s estate is the only well-built and well-organised property in the kingdom.

The Academy of Lagado. Paul Gavarni, mid-nineteenth century.

Lagado by Rex Whistler, mid-twentieth century.

Other than the four maps and the portrait of Gulliver, the only set-piece that was illustrated in the first edition was the mechanical word machine.

Throughout the Travels Swift may have been a critic of his world, but he was also a deeply conservative man with an instinctive anti-modern streak in his thinking. His fear was that human hubris, and our addiction to innovation, would result in abuse, social disruption, and lead to perpetual schism and civil war, and potentially result in our self-destruction.

The final masterful comic set piece in Book III is the project of the Word Machine. This is

a project for improving speculative knowledge, by practical and mechanical operations … where the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.

The inventor of the word machine asks Gulliver if he could source some investors to fund the vast cost of building 500 of these word machines. Gulliver reports how ‘the professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials, to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences’. We could say that this is Swift’s take on the internet and AI.

Book IV: A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms

In ‘A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms’, Gulliver finds himself in a land where rational horses, who call themselves Houyhnhnms are in charge. This has always been the most controversial part of Gulliver’s Travels. In 1851, the Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, in a memorable piece of overstatement, described the ending of this portion of the novel as ‘filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene... past all sense of manliness and shame’.

According to Gulliver, ‘The word Houyhnhnm… means the perfection of nature’. The Houyhnhnms have been often presented by Swift’s critics as representing Swift’s desired moral standards with their supreme rationality and the resultant equanimity in all things. The Houyhnhnms inhabit a simple (even simplistic) peaceful world, replete with civilised conversation and poetry, which is their only art form. One result of the Houyhnhnm extreme rationality is a complete lack of disputes, or even of differences of opinion, on any topic. The Houyhnhnms have no concept of lying, which they call ‘saying the thing, which was not’. Because of their extreme rationality the Houyhnhnms have no need for religion, no need for God, no need for providence, and no need for an afterlife; the result is an atheistic, boring, smug, self-satisfied and deeply unfulfilling world which they intend will continue unchanged in perpetuity; perhaps Swift’s idea of hell on earth.

Map of Houyhnhnmland. Source: The British Library.

First page of “A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms”.
The British Library.

Grandville’s representation of the Houyhnhnms, 1838.

Houyhnhnmland, however, is infested by creatures called Yahoos; humanoid, uncivilised, illiterate, unspeaking, and violent beasts. His deception of the enslaved Yahoos has been portrayed as racist against Black people by some readers. However, for Swift all humans are yahoos.

The Yahoos have no good points. Gulliver records their fixation on ‘shining stones’ recording how they ‘will dig with their claws for whole days to get them out; then carry them away, and hide them by heaps in their kennels; but still looking round with great caution, for fear their comrades should find out their treasure’.

From the beginning the Houyhnhnms don’t know what to make of Gulliver; he looks like a Yahoo, walks like a Yahoo, but he can talk and he has some element of reason. It takes them some time to realise that his clothes are merely a cover and that underneath he is as naked as the Yahoos. When a female Yahoo sees the naked Gulliver while swimming she instinctively knows this is a potential mate of the same species. Gulliver may have been a superior specimen of Yahoo, but Yahoo he is and, once a Yahoo always a Yahoo. Gulliver likewise comes to realise that he, and therefore all humanity, are in essence, Yahoos.

Image of Yahoos being herded by Houyhnhnms.

Gulliver building his boat, by Francis Waller.

For Gulliver this admission is so disturbing that he becomes deluded and effectively mad in his efforts to emulate the rationality and apparent mental equanimity of the Houyhnhnms. This effort is of course bound to fail. The last we see of Gulliver is as a forlorn deluded solitary figure in his stable talking to his horses who ‘understand me tolerably well’.

By the time of his departure from Houyhnhnmland, Gulliver has so absorbed the Houyhnhnm ideology that he displays no scruples in building his canoe from Yahoo hides, making it waterproof by Yahoo tallow and dressed in a suit made from Yahoo hides.

Histoire de Gulliver, print, 1842.
See on Gallica

Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Gulliver’s Visual Afterlives

There is a vast range of representations of Gulliver including coins, postcards, pens, scarves, bags, bookmarks, mugs, posters, advertisements, murals, and mannequins. Gulliver’s name has been used on numerous businesses as varied as adventure and amusement parks, car rental companies, restaurants and bookshops.

Gulliver has featured in more than forty movies and TV shows. The first such rendition featuring some scenes from Books I and II was made in Paris in 1902 by Georges Méliès and a restored colourised version is available online.

In 1996, Dublin City Council erected eight large terracotta roundels, created by Irish sculptor Michael C Keane, that recount scenes from Gulliver’s visit to Lilliput. These roundels are set on a social housing complex within sight of Swift’s cathedral and his deanery.

The first edition of the Travels included four maps (their obvious inaccuracy was more confusing than helpful), an image of the word machine, and a portrait of Gulliver. Images of Gulliver involved in various situations, both serious and comic, first appeared as early as the 1727 French translation, published in The Hague. Other illustrations were created for the new translation published later the same year in Paris.

From around 1800 what had been a steady trickle of illustrated Travels quickly became a torrent.

Advertisement for thread purportedly strong enough to tie down a giant Gulliver.

Gulliver in Lilliput
by Michael C Keane.

The first illustration of Gulliver on the beach from the French edition, 1727.

French edition, illustrated by E. Morin.
See on Gallica

Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Ville de Paris / Fonds Heure joyeuse.

William Butler Yeats, portrait by George Charles Beresford. Source: National Portrait Gallery

Swift’s writings, and especially the biting satiric text of Gulliver’s Travels, have had a profound influence on generations of academics, literary critics and historians, but also on major literary figures. In Ireland W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, while separated from Swift by nearly two centuries, both wrote in the shadow of Swift. Yeats famously quipped that:

Swift haunts me; he is always just round the next corner.

George Orwell, who despised Swift’s politics nevertheless fully understood his insightful forewarning of the dangers of groupthink and schism as a foundation stone of totalitarianism. Orwell listed Gulliver’s Travels as one of what he termed ‘the six indispensable books in world literature’. The leading Palestinian philosopher and intellectual Edward Said professed a deep admiration for what he termed Swift’s ‘Tory anarchism’ and for his biting critique of colonialism.

In 2010 Dublin was the fourth city to be awarded the accolade of UNESCO City of Literature. This award recognised the world-renowned literary greats associated with the city, such as Dublin’s Nobel laureates Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats. It was also recognition of Dublin’s current and recent crop of Booker Prize winners and of their numerous illustrious predecessors such as Oscar Wilde, J. M. Synge, Bram Stoker and the earliest member of the pantheon of Dublin’s literary greats, Jonathan Swift.

One City One Book
In 2008 Gulliver’s Travels was featured in One City One Book: led by Dublin City Council Libraries and Archives, this festival presents a programme of readings, lectures, and other events, all linked to a single text.

Portrait of Jonathan Swift
by Charles Jervas, c. 1711.

Conclusion

Gulliver may be 300 years old, but Swift's savage satire on human hubris, folly and destructiveness is not time bound; the message is universal. Gulliver's Travels, written in an accessible comic and straightforward style, remains as relevant today as when it was first published in London in October 1726. Readers are encouraged, like millions before them over the past 300 years, to read on and enjoy this funny, exciting, thought-provoking and on occasion infuriating text - exactly as its author Jonathan Swift intended.

Scientific direction: Brendan Twomey, Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Early Modern History, Trinity College, Dublin

This online exhibition was created in association with Marsh’s Library, Dublin with the support of Ministère de la Culture - DRAC Ile-de-France.

Explore Further

Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

Leo Damrosch, author a recent much praised biography of Swift, gives a very considered and erudite presentation on Swift the man, the author and the churchman.

Watch the video

The life and times of Jonathan Swift

A presentation of the life and works of Jonathan Swift by Brendan Twomey, author of this exhibition.

Watch the video

John Banville on Gulliver's Travels at 300

Author John Banville and editor David Womersley reflect on the Jonathan Swift classic, on RTÉ Radio 1’s Arena.

Listen on RTÉ Radio 1

"Les Voyages de Gulliver" de Jonathan Swift : conte philosophique, récit fantastique et satire politique (in French)

French-specialist Jean Viviès and director Valérie Lesort in conversation about their perception and work on Gulliver’s Travels, in France Culture’s Book Club.

Listen on Radio France

Selected Reading List

Swift remains one of the most written about and studied authors in the English language. Every year scholarly works on the life and works of Jonathan Swift, or on one of his major works are published. In addition, there is a vast and ever-growing archive of scholarly articles in peer reviewed historical, literary and cultural journals.

Swift is widely taught in universities and there is a resultant stream of Masters and PhD theses about his life and publications. There is also a vast corpus of newspaper columns, podcasts and other Swiftian material.

Important twenty-first century works include:

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, Cambridge University Press
Jonathan Swift in Context, edited by Joseph Hone and Pat Rogers, Cambridge University Press, 2024.
The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels, edited by Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Swift in Print: Published Texts in Dublin and London, 1691–1765, Valerie Rumbold, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Reading Swift's Poetry, Daniel Cook, Cambridge University Press, 2020.

The 300^th anniversary of the publication of Gulliver’s Travels has resulted in the publication of several new books on Swift and Gulliver:

Gulliver’s Afterlives: 300 Years of Transmedia Adaptation, Daniel Cook, Bloomsbury, 2026.
The Last Amateur: Jonathan Swift, Edward Said, and the Profession of Literature, Helen Deutsch, The University of Chicago Press, 2026
The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire and the Writing of Gulliver's Travels, Hester Grant, HarperCollins, 2026.

Since 2000 four lengthy scholarly biographies have been published:

Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His Works, Yale University Press, 2014.
Eugene Hammond, Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in, University of Delaware Press, 2016 and Jonathan Swift: Our Dean, University of Delaware Press, 2016.
John Stubbs, Jonathan Swift: The reluctant Rebel, Penguin, 2017.
Thomas Lockwood, The life of Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography, Wiley-Blackwell, 2023

See also the Ehrenpreis Centre for Swift Studies a research institute founded at the University of Münster in 1986 to commemorate the leading Swift scholar Irvin Ehrenpreis.