Trinity College Dublin celebrates 300 years of Gulliver’s Travels with exhibitions and events
Three hundred years after its anonymous publication in October 1726, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is being celebrated with a series of events across Ireland, including a major exhibition at Trinity College Dublin, the author’s alma mater. The satirical masterpiece, originally titled Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, was an immediate sensation and has since become a cornerstone of popular culture through translations, children’s editions, comics, and films. The Trinity exhibition, which runs until December and is also available online, draws on the university’s extensive collection of hundreds of editions and adaptations. Among the items on display are engraved illustrations, pop-up versions, a 1976 Marvel comic, and the only known surviving copy of an abridgement printed in 1761. The show takes visitors through all the lands Gulliver encounters, not just Lilliput, as co-curator Stephanie Breen explains: “Lemuel Gulliver’s first voyage to the land of Lilliput is the one most familiar to audiences today.”
A journey beyond Lilliput
Breen adds that the exhibition “brings viewers on a journey to all of the lands Gulliver encountered – Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and beyond and the country of Houyhnhnms.” The display also includes contemporary works that reimagine the story from the perspective of Gulliver’s neglected wife, Mary, who was left at home “big with child” during his travels. Alison Fell’s The Mistress of Lilliput and Lauren Chater’s Gulliver’s Wife are featured, reflecting a feminist retelling of the classic.
Swift’s Laputa, a floating island devoted to arts and science, resonates with modern anxieties about technology, according to co-curator Aileen Douglas. The island’s inhabitants attempt to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and use a mechanical “engine” to generate knowledge without genius or study. Elsewhere, in the kingdom of Luggnagg, Gulliver is horrified by the Struldbruggs, a race of immortals who age and sicken eternally.
Swift’s enduring satire
Born in 1667, Swift combined his duties as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin with a career as a pamphleteer and essayist, pioneering a deadpan, savage style of satire. His A Modest Proposal famously suggested selling Irish children as food to the wealthy. Gulliver’s Travels was written in Dublin and at an estate in County Meath, where, according to tradition, very tall and very short farm workers inspired the story’s giants and Lilliputians.
The novel skewered Georgian pretensions and sectarian conflicts, with the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu over which end of a boiled egg to crack serving as a satire on Europe’s religious wars. In Brobdingnag, the giant king condemns humanity as “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Despite the book’s anonymous publication, its success and Swift’s literary reputation meant, as Douglas notes, “People sort of knew it was him.”
Celebrations extend beyond Trinity. At St Patrick’s Cathedral, a children’s choir will premiere a work by composer Seán Doherty, alongside organ recitals and readings by Swift scholar Brendan Twomey. The Robinson Library in County Armagh is hosting an exhibition and lecture series until December. A panel discussion at Trinity on Wednesday will explore the role of art in challenging power and Swift’s attacks on human vanity and scientific arrogance.
