Gulliver's Travels

On this week’s programme, we mark 300 years since the publication of one of the most famous books every written – Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. A story of tiny people, giants, flying islands and intelligent horses, it’s also a biting satire of politics, war, scientific ambition and human nature itself. We’ll hear the story of its secretive publication, explore what it has to say about the relationship between Britain and Ireland, and ask why Swift’s strange and unsettling masterpiece still speaks so sharply to the modern world.

One of the things being lampooned in Gulliver’s Travels is the genre of travel writing. By the early eighteenth century, travel writing had become enormously popular. Readers looked to travellers for information about distant places – and had to decide whether the extraordinary things they described, could actually be believed. Swift borrowed the familiar style and conventions of factual travel accounts, and pushed them to increasingly absurd extremes. Our reporter Marc McMenamin spoke to Professor Daniel Carey of the University of Galway (an expert on the history of travel writing) about the tradition Swift was drawing upon, and how he turned it against itself.

Then, Myles is joined in studio by two guests. Dr Brendan Twomey is an historian, and a researcher of all things Swiftian. Gerry Mullins is a writer and the creator of the new musical And Then There Was Gulliver. Its World Premiere is at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, on Thursday 26th November at 8PM. That’s happening as part of the 2026 Jonathan Swift Festival. Tickets are available here.

The manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels arrived at the home of the London publisher Benjamin Motte in the dead of night, on the 8th of August 1726. The story of how the book reached Motte, and how Swift attempted to conceal his authorship, was a decidedly cloak-and-dagger affair. Back in August, at the West Cork History Festival, Myles discussed Gulliver’s Travels with two more expert guests. Adam Tomkins is John Millar Professor of Public Law at the University of Glasgow. Hester Grant is the author of the book The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire and the Writing of Gulliver’s Travels, published earlier this year by HarperCollins. We hear an extract from that discussion, about the unusual circumstances in which the book was published, and some of the many targets of Swift’s satire. Our thanks to Simon and Victoria Kingston for facilitating that interview. And if you want to see the full discussion with Hester and Adam, you can find it on the West Cork History Festival Youtube channel. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.