Two men leave the England of Queen Anne, which has lately created the United Kingdom of Great Britain. One is a merchant, the other a ship’s surgeon. Both become the sole survivors of a shipwreck. The first man is compelled to rebuild his civilization in miniature around him. The second is compelled to endure being miniaturized and having his civilization relativized. The first man’s story is The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner . . . Written by Himself, which Daniel Defoe published anonymously in 1719. The second man’s story is the first voyage of the Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts, which Jonathan Swift published under the name of its protagonist Lemuel Gulliver in 1726.

Gulliver sails from Bristol in May 1699, bound for the East Indies. He is shipwrecked in the South Indian Ocean off Sumatra, near the fictional islands of Lilliput and Blefescu. While Robinson Crusoe invents a society with Friday, the native he conquers, Gulliver cannot escape other people. Awaking on the shore of Lilliputia, he finds his limbs and hair are pinned to the ground by tiny “Pegs and Strings.” When he sits up, the Lilliputians, who are six inches tall, barrage him with hundreds of tiny arrows. The giant becomes a favorite at the Lilliputian court after saving the Lilliputians from invasion by the little people of Blefescu. But the tall poppy is accused of treason after putting out a fire at the queen’s palace by urinating on it. Sentenced to blinding, Gulliver escapes with the assistance of a patron and makes it back home.

Two months later, he leaves again. His ship is blown off course, and his shipmates abandon him on the west coast of North America. Among the giants of Brobdingnag, the power and the proportions are reversed. The Brobdingnagians are seventy-two feet tall. A farmer exhibits little Lemuel as a freak. The king embodies the virtues of an ideal monarch, but the queen toys with Gulliver and carries him around in a windowless box as a pet. Her maids of honor use him “like a Creature who had no Sort of Consequence”; one of them, Gulliver complains, “sometimes set me astride upon one of her Nipples; with many other Tricks, wherein the Reader will excuse me for not being over particular.” An eagle picks up the box and dumps it into the ocean. A passing ship returns Gulliver to England.

We know Gulliver’s Travels in two forms. One is a comic fantasy for children, a simplified condensation of Gulliver’s first two voyages. Every child is a Gulliver. Born adrift, children must decipher random customs, endure pointless cruelty, and decode the arbitrary powers of sexuality and politics. The moral of this bowdlerized tale is that if children pass the hurdles on the road to adulthood, they can go home. But the cask-strength original is the four-voyage satire for early Georgian adults. Swift published this work with considered subterfuge after the frustration of his political ambitions. This is a fantasy too, but it is a revenge fantasy: Swift’s coded revolt against British society and, in the fourth book especially, the human condition.

Defoe and Swift were political pamphleteers before they were novelists. Both pamphleteered anonymously in the 1690s for the Whig oligarchy that managed Britain, then switched in the early 1700s to attach themselves to a Tory patron, Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford. Each found himself out of favor and money when Harley’s star fell in 1714.

Defoe, the son of middle-class Dissenters from the City of London, made his own way in the manner of one of his fictional heroes as a hosiery and wine merchant, a spy and a debtor, and a writer with nearly two hundred pseudonyms. Defoe climbed the winding stair as a practical patriot offering advice on information management and the economic and nation-building uses of science in what he called a “Projecting Age.” Swift ascended by the older, genteel path of cultural politics, private patronage, and positions within the established church. The posthumous son of an English lawyer who had moved to Dublin, Swift left Ireland in 1688 amid the troubles of the Glorious Revolution to become secretary to the diplomat Sir William Temple.

In 1704, Defoe wrote “A Scheme of General Intelligence,” a pamphlet aimed at Harley, who was then Queen Anne’s secretary of state, proposing the creation of a wide-ranging intelligence service. In the same year, Swift published his first major works, A Tale of a Tub, an allegorical mockery of Christian sectarianism, and The Battle of the Books, a vindication of Temple’s argument for the Ancients over the Moderns. Two years later, Harley obtained Defoe’s release from prison for directly mocking Christian sectarianism and sent him to Scotland to identify opponents of the imminent Act of Union. Five years later, in 1711, Harley became Queen Anne’s Lord High Treasurer and proto–prime minister. While Defoe’s Review of the Affairs of France supported the Tories’ foreign policy in print, Swift edited the Examiner, a Tory newspaper, and observed Harley’s ministry as a social and political insider.

The Stuart dynasty expired with Anne in 1714. The Hanoverian George I arrived, the Tories fell, and Robert Walpole and the Whigs moved in. Defoe reversed by writing Tory-sounding satires. Swift returned to Dublin with a sinecure as dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. By 1720, he was writing to Alexander Pope that he was working on a satire “to vex the world, not to divert it.”

In his introduction to Cambridge University Press’s three-hundredth-anniversary edition of Gulliver’s Travels, David Womersley describes how Swift had to hide his tracks. He wrote knowing that Whig agents opened his letters in the Post Office and copied them for the authorities in London. The Walpole ministry already wanted to put a name to his recent work. In 1722, the English manufacturer William Wood had obtained a government patent to mint a low-denomination copper coinage for Ireland. Wood, who also minted a low-denomination American coinage (seventy-five percent brass, twenty percent zinc with iron and bismuth, five percent silver), bought the patent for ten thousand pounds from George I’s mistress, the Duchess of Kendal. As Wood stood to lose on the production costs of the Irish coinage and the annual eight hundred pounds he undertook to pay the king, he may well have intended to debase or even counterfeit his coinage.

The Church of Ireland, the commissioner of the Irish Revenue, and the Irish parliament all remonstrated with London. Isaac Newton, then Master of the Mint in London, assayed some of Wood’s coins and judged them to be of the same quality as England’s coinage, although the issue was not the quality of the coins but the imperious quality of England’s handling of Ireland’s money, which did not extend to creating a national bank for Ireland. Swift, whose Proposal for the Uses of Irish Manufacture argued for processing Irish raw materials in Ireland rather than exporting them to England, wrote seven furious pamphlets as M. B. Drapier. The surname suggests that like Defoe, Drapier is a middle-class dealer in cloth.

Drapier was a pious member of the Church of Ireland and a loyal subject of George I, but he also argued for Ireland’s political and economic autonomy under the Crown: “For in all Reason, all Government without the Consent of the Governed, is the very Definition of Slavery,” he wrote in his fourth letter. The Drapier Letters, as they became known, were condemned in the London parliament. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland offered a three-hundred-pound bounty for Drapier’s real name, and the printer, John Harding, was arrested. But the letter also raised a boycott of the coinage that forced its withdrawal in 1725. Swift, who was known in Dublin to be the Drapier, became an Irish hero for defeating the English Whig oligarchy, and the Drapier Letters one of the first clarion calls of modern Irish nationalism.

Defoe was jailed for “seditious libel,” and Walpole’s men wanted to punish the Drapier for it too. Publishing Gulliver’s Travels required, as Womersley puts it, “elaborate precautions.” In March 1726, Swift left Dublin for London carrying “a Copy” of the manuscript written in another’s hand, for deniability if he were intercepted. Soon afterward, his friend Charles Ford left Dublin carrying the holograph (the original in Swift’s hand, which would have allowed Ford to deny knowledge of its contents). In August, the playwright John Gay, with whom Swift was lodging, sent about a quarter of the book to the London publisher Benjamin Motte. Gay’s cover letter, written under the name Richard Sympson, warned that some of the contents might be “a little Satyrical.” Motte agreed to pay two hundred pounds. By then, Swift was on his way back to Dublin.

“Motte receiv’d the copy (he tells me) he knew now from whence, nor from whom, dropp’d at his house in the dark, from a Hackney-coach: by computing the time, I found it was after you left England,” Alexander Pope informed Swift.

Motte brought the manuscript to his partner Andrew Tooke, who, Womersley tells us, “specialised in the massaging of difficult or dangerous material.” His firm made deletions and additions to render the text less likely to offend the powerful, especially in Gulliver’s third and fourth voyages. When Swift received the printed book, he was enraged. In the second half, he wrote to Pope, “several passages” were “patch’d and altered, and the style of a different sort.” In 1733, George Faulkner, a Dublin printer, approached Swift and proposed a collected edition of his works. Swift, who still bemoaned the “mangled and murdered Pages” of Motte’s edition, examined and approved every sheet of Faulkner’s edition.

Womersley’s text is based on Faulkner’s clean version and was published in 2012. The tercentenary edition contains annotations and a chronology; correspondence including letters between Sympson and Motte and Swift’s exchanges with Ford and Pope; facsimiles of the 1726 and 1735 title pages and frontispiece portraits of Gulliver and pages from Swift’s annotated personal copy; the bowdlerized passages and Swift’s originals; related matter such as the “Letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson” of 1727, commendatory verses from “Titty Tit, Esq., Poet Laureate to his Majesty of LILLIPUT,” complaining verses from Mrs. Mary Gulliver; and Womersley’s detailed introductory essay.

When Gulliver returns from Brobdingnag after his second voyage, it is as if he is back in Lilliput. Everything looks small, even his wife and servants. After only ten days at home, he allows his “evil Destiny” to draw him back to sea. His third voyage takes him to Japan via the “flying island” of Laputa and its subordinate island of Balnibarbi. The Laputans’ physical proportions are normal, but their minds are in the clouds along with their bodies and homes. A society of mathematicians, musicians, and astronomers, the Laputans stay airborne by manipulating the magnetic power of a “Load-stone” in the “Astronomers’ Cave.” Beneath them is their shadowland, the poor and shambolic Balnibarbi.

Gulliver’s guide to Balnibarbi, Lord Munodi, was governor of Balnibarbi’s capital, Lagado, until a “Cabal of Ministers” tipped him from office; his name, Womersley notes, may be a contraction of mundum odio, “I hate the world.” He takes Gulliver to his country house, an island of civilization and reason, “built according to the best rules of ancient Architecture.” But Munodi is a “melancholy” man out of office, at odds with his age, and possibly also under surveillance. Balnibarbi has imported the “Volatile Spirits” of Laputa’s abstract mania for science. The ideals of the “Airy Region” come down to earth as grasping and absurd ambition. While the country goes to waste and the people wear rags, the professors in Lagado’s Academy of Projectors busy themselves with “Schemes of putting all Arts, Sciences, Languages and Mechanicks upon a new Foot.”

One projector has spent eight years trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Another, the “most ancient Student of the Academy,” is “daubed over with Filth” from his effort to reverse human excrement into its original foodstuffs. A team of blind apprentices mixes paint under the supervision of a blind painter. An architect builds houses from the roof downward. An astronomer places a sundial atop the weathercock of the town hall and adjusts the motions of the planets so that the sundial is accurate. A “great Physician” promises to cure afflatus by inserting an ivory-muzzled bellows “eight inches up the anus” and pumping in more air. He demonstrates it by inflating a dog’s bowels, eliciting a “Discharge” so violent that it kills the dog.

“In the School of political Projectors I was but ill entertained,” Gulliver reports from Lagado, “the Professors appearing in my Judgment wholly out of their Senses; which is a Scene that never fails to make me melancholy.” The professors show him “a large Paper of Instructions for discovering Plots and Conspiracies against the Government.” The techniques of Augustan pre-crime include knowing suspects’ dietary and sleep patterns, knowing “with which hand they wipe their Posteriors” and taking “a strict view of their Excrements.” The stools of a man who considers regicide betray his thoughts with a “tincture” of Irish green.

Gulliver’s reply could be an indictment of Defoe:

I told him that, in the Kingdom of Tribnia, by the Natives called Langden, where I had long sojourned, the Bulk of the People consisted wholly of Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, Evidences, Swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern Instruments; all under the Colours, the Conduct, and the pay of Ministers of State, and their Deputies.

In his preface to The Battle of the Books, Swift called satire “a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body’s Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that kind of Reception it meets in the World, and that so very few are offended with it.” Gulliver’s Travels is, on its face, a universal satire on human nature. Beneath that surface, however, Swift secreted a particular satire. The energy of the prose is in these opaque details of political grievance and personal score-settling. Much of the staging remains obvious. The flying city of Laputa (Spanish for “the whore”) is an allegory of England, where money is everything, political “Projectors” confound law and language, and the Whig-aligned logic-choppers and ladder-climbers of the Royal Society project their careers and status upward in the name of science and reason. Tribnia is an anagram of Britain, though the people call it Langden, which is an anagram of England and sounds like “London” Balnibarbi’s rebel city of Lindalino has a double “lin” and stands for Dublin.

The colonial allegory becomes explicit in the fourth voyage. After five months at home, Gulliver leaves his pregnant wife and accepts a commission to captain a ship bound for an island in the West Indies. Its rulers, the Houyhnhnms, are talking horses; their name is a neighing sound. Heirs to the Roman equites, they live on their estates like the independent English equestrians Swift idealized in his Examiner papers. They have no king or aristocracy. Their society divides into gentry and a human-like servant race called the Yahoos. They have a noble “Disposition to all Virtues, and have no Conception of Ideas of what is evil in a rational Creature; so their grand Maxim is, to cultivate Reason, and to be wholly governed by it.” For this reason, when the Yahoos invaded, they massacred most of them and now keep the Yahoos in kennels. They hold a periodic Representative Council, but their politics are so stable and settled that “the only Debate that ever happened in their Country” is “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth.”

Gulliver identifies with the Houyhnhnms, but they see him as a Yahoo. So do the Yahoos, who are lascivious, smelly, and stupid. When he is bathing naked in a river, a young Yahoo girl leaps in and embraces him “after a most fulsome Manner.” After that, he can “no longer deny, that I was a real Yahoo, in every Limb and Feature, since the Females had a natural Propensity to me as one of their own Species.” The Houyhnhnms expel him because his “Rudiments of Reason” might inflame the Yahoos to revolt, like the Irish “raparees” and “tories” who raided English settlements in Ireland and gave Harley’s faction its nickname.

Gulliver is allowed to leave, and he rows for England on a coracle lined with the “skins of Yahoos well stitched together.” His wife Mary and family receive him with “Surprize and Joy,” but their sight fills him with “Hatred, Disgust and Contempt.” His mind is full of the “Virtues and Ideas of those exalted Houyhnhnms,” and he now sees and smells the “odious Animal” in Mary. He is overwhelmed by “Shame, Confusion and Horror” at the memory of “copulating with one of the Yahoo-species.” He retreats to a stable with two stallions and a groom whose horsey smell is an aid to meditating on the Houyhnhnm virtues. Eventually he manages to take dinner with his wife at “the farthest End of a long Table,” with his nose “well stopt with Rue, Lavender, or Tobacco-Leaves.” There is no homecoming. He has seen and smelled the human animal. Society is intolerable.

Swift, Womersley writes, ordered Gulliver’s four voyages as “a form of moral entrapment.” The trap is baited with the “seemingly innocent sweets of fantasy” in the inversions of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, whose follies are the familiar antagonisms of England and France. Swift wrote the fourth voyage before he wrote the third, but he ordered them to maximize the disillusioning effect. In the third voyage, the floor of logic gives way beneath the mad scientists of Lagado. This leads to the universal satire of the fourth voyage, in which hierarchy and reason rest on a universal tendency to murder. By the time Gulliver retreats from human society to live with his horses, Swift, Womersley writes, has led the reader “to insights about the moral nature of human beings which are impossible to act upon, but also impossible to ignore.”

In his essay “Politics vs. Literature,” published in 1946, George Orwell called Swift a “Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty.” Orwell may have got it the wrong way around. Swift recognized authority as the bulwark against the incontinence of anarchy: Gulliver would rather admire the Houyhnhnms than admit that he is a Yahoo. Man the stinking animal revolted Swift, and the Yahoos’ incapacity for virtue in the mass limited the rewards of liberty, but the Houyhnhnms are a bloodless herd, as aloft on the delusions of reason as the scholars of Laputa. Swift, a churchman who wrote with his speech constricted and his name hidden, knew the value of religious conscience and political liberty. It is also hard to affirm Orwell’s assertion that Swift was akin to the Catholic reactionaries of the twentieth century whose lack of political influence allowed them to provoke by paradoxes what would not be tested. The author of Drapier’s letters and Gulliver’s memoirs remained a political writer long after his career in London ended. In Swift’s morbid assessment of 1730 that he had retired to Dublin “to die here in a rage, like a poison’d rat in a hole,” we read the recognition that all political careers end in failure.

Orwell, who is Swift’s rival when it comes to olfactory obsession, was closer to the mark when he suspected that Swift was “driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.” But what kind of Tory was Swift? He was a Whig for most of his political career, but this was an age when faction and patronage meant more than party and ideology. Like Defoe, he switched out of necessity and opportunism. He remained a Whig in politics, a High Churchman in religion, and a clear-sighted diagnostician of reason’s prospects of straightening humanity’s crooked timber.

There is a grim symbolism to Swift’s end. A lifelong sufferer of vertigo and intermittent deafness in his left ear, probably from Ménière’s disease, Swift experienced a critical eruption of the spleen around 1737, followed by speech disorder, memory loss, and outbursts of rage (the effects of dementia or perhaps Alzheimer’s disease). He died in 1745, aged seventy-eight, mute and dependent. The Lilliputians strip Gulliver of all his possessions bar his spectacles, which become a shield in the battle with Blefuscu. The Brobdingnagians reverse the lens, and Gulliver is permanently reduced in scale. The Laputan scholars have telescopes stronger than Swift’s European contemporaries. In his final illness before falling silent, Swift clawed at an egg-sized abscess on his left eyeball.

The madness that Gulliver discovers and Swift sought to control was not just the appalling comedy of the body. It was the vision of human cruelty and the tragedy of language. Speech assumes the correlation of words and objects, and the hierarchy of language over life, but the demotic insurgency from below and the airy projections of reason above affirm that language is also disorder, the great leveler. “If the moderns mean by madness only a disturbance or transposition of the brain, by force of certain vapours issuing up from the lower faculties,” Swift wrote in The Tale of a Tub, “then has this madness been the parent of all those mighty revolutions that have happened in empire, in philosophy, and in religion.”