Penguin Classics: Gulliver's Travels

Swift published Gulliver's Travels in 1726 'to vex the world rather than to divert it'. If the world has often replied by expurgating the book and presenting it to children to read, it has never quite succeeded in extracting the sting from this scornful and incisive satire on man. Gulliver is a book to which the adult reader comes back with surprise and a fresh respect. Whether it is seen as the product of an embittered mind or a profound comment on the Age of Reason and Nature, there is all the fascination of distorting mirrors in Swift's accounts of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and far more than mere spleen in the saeva indignatio with which he lashes human passions and institutions.