Gulliver's Travels [antikvár]

Introduction Gulliver's Travels is not only one of the great books in the English language, but it is a world classic - one of those books that the English-speaking peoples have contributed to the world's literature. This along with very different and widely varied company who have made a marked impact on the outside world: Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Byron, Dickens; Hobbes and John Locke; Geoffrey of Monmouth through the Arthurian saga. Some of our greatest writers, Milton and Wordsworth, for example, have not made much impact in other languages. But Jonathan Swift certainly has. Gulliver's Travels has been read all over the world and translated into most of its leading languages. (It was at once translated into French, then the language of cultivated Europe; I do not know if it has been published in Chinese, the language of the greatest people in the world; if not, it certainly should be.) Why should this be? Well, like all the greatest works of literature, it appeals on several levels, in depth. The better you know the work the more you find in it; the book appeals to one as a child, but one finds there is much more in it than meets the eye as one gets older. It offers a marked contrast in this respect to the work that is sometimes thought of along with it, was written about the same time and in some ways lies close to it: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. (They didn't like each other; Defoe attacked Swift, who took no notice, for he looked down on Defoe.) Robinson Crusoe has been found irresistibly readable; for its story; but it all proceeds straightforwardly on one level, with no further depths of meaning, no profounder levels of irony, satire, vexation, grief at the human condition. In what, then, consists the greatness of Gulliver's Travels! In one word, its universality; it not only appeals to all sorts and conditions of men, to children of all ages, but it applies to them. It is a very salutary book, if they would but take notice