57 Fun Facts About Gulliver's Travels

How do candidates win high office at Lilliput's court?

Rope-dancing: whoever jumps highest on the rope without falling gets the vacant post, and sitting ministers are often ordered to repeat the feat to prove they have not lost the knack.

What is Gulliver's first name?

The narrator is Lemuel Gulliver; the original title page presents him as the author, and the full title begins Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, In Four Parts.

What was Gulliver's profession before he became a ship's captain?

Surgeon: Gulliver trained under a London surgeon and studied physic at Leiden, and he returned to sea as a ship's surgeon when his London practice began to fail.

What is the name of the ship wrecked in a storm on Gulliver's first voyage?

The Antelope was driven onto a rock in a storm north-west of Van Diemen's Land and split; the boat Gulliver escaped in capsized, and he alone swam to shore.

What have the Lilliputians done to Gulliver by the time he wakes?

Tied him down: slender cords pin his arms, legs and even his hair to the ground, and when he struggles the six-inch archers loose a volley of arrows that prick like needles.

What trivial question divides Lilliput's two warring religious sects?

The sects fight over which end of a boiled egg to crack open: after a young prince cut his finger on the big end, an edict ordered every egg broken at the small end.

What distinguishes Lilliput's two political parties, a parody of the Tories and Whigs?

The height of their heels: the Tramecksan wear them high and the Slamecksan low, while the emperor's heir wears one of each and hobbles as a result.

Which rival island nation's fleet does Gulliver capture for Lilliput?

Gulliver wades the 800-yard channel and tows away the fleet of Blefuscu; his refusal to help reduce the island to a province then turns the emperor against him.

How does Gulliver put out a fire in the royal palace of Lilliput?

He urinates on it and the fire is out in three minutes, but making water in the palace is a capital crime, and the disgusted empress never forgives him.

What punishment is Gulliver sentenced to in Lilliput before he escapes?

Blinding was urged by his friend Reldresal as a mercy, since others on the council wanted him killed; warned in secret, Gulliver slipped away to the rival island first.

Which Lilliputian official is usually read as a caricature of Sir Robert Walpole?

Flimnap, the lord high treasurer, is often read as Walpole; long Gulliver's secret enemy, he turns openly cold after court gossip that his own wife has paid the visitor a private call.

What is the name of the land of giants Gulliver reaches on his second voyage?

Brobdingnag gave English the adjective Brobdingnagian, meaning gigantic; Gulliver is stranded there when his shipmates row off in terror from a giant wading after them.

In the land of giants, which household pests the size of large dogs attack Gulliver on the farmer's bed?

Rats: two of them climb the bed curtains, and Gulliver kills one with his sword and wounds the other as it flees.

What is the name of the giant farmer's daughter who becomes Gulliver's nurse and companion?

Glumdalclitch, whose name means 'little nurse', is nine years old and, at not above forty feet, little for her age; she goes with Gulliver into the queen's service.

What does the giant farmer do with Gulliver before selling him?

Exhibits him for money as a curiosity: the farmer shows Gulliver at inns and market towns, ten times a day in the capital, until he is worn almost to a skeleton.

What carries off Gulliver's travelling box and drops it into the sea, ending his second voyage?

A giant eagle seizes the travelling box by its ring and, harried by other eagles, drops it into the sea, where the crew of an English ship find Gulliver floating.

What does Gulliver offer to teach the giant king, who recoils in horror?

The use of guns and cannon: Gulliver offers the secret of gunpowder as a gift, and the appalled king orders him, as he values his life, never to speak of it again.

What is Laputa, the first land Gulliver reaches on his third voyage?

Laputa is a flying island about four and a half miles across, held aloft by a giant lodestone set in an adamantine base and steered by tilting the magnet.

Which absurd project is under way at the Grand Academy of Lagado?

One projector has spent eight years extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, to be sealed in vials and let out to warm the air in raw summers; he begs Gulliver for money.

The Grand Academy of Lagado satirises which real institution?

The Royal Society's experimenters become Swift's 'projectors', each certain that success is only a few years off and each begging visitors for money to carry on.

On the island of Glubbdubdrib, whom does Gulliver converse with?

The ghosts of historical figures are raised by the island's governor, a sorcerer: Gulliver meets Caesar, Brutus and Homer, and hears Aristotle admit his mistakes to Descartes.

What are the struldbrugs of Luggnagg?

People who are immortal but still age, the struldbrugs lose teeth, memory and friends, and at eighty they are declared legally dead so that their heirs can inherit.

Which real country does Gulliver visit at the end of his third voyage?

In Japan Gulliver lands at Xamoschi and, posing as a Dutchman, asks the Emperor to excuse him from trampling on the crucifix, as Dutch traders were required to do.

What are the Houyhnhnms?

Intelligent, civilised horses, the Houyhnhnms are so ruled by reason that their language has no word for lying; they call it 'saying the thing which was not'.

What are the Yahoos?

The Yahoos are savage, filthy human-like creatures kept as beasts by the Houyhnhnms; Swift coined the word, which now means a crude, brutish person.

Why does Gulliver end up in the land of the Houyhnhnms?

His crew mutinies and maroons him: the sailors he hired turn out to be buccaneers, lock him in his cabin for weeks and row him ashore on the first land they find.

What does Gulliver try to do when taken aboard Pedro de Mendez's ship?

Leap overboard: Gulliver would sooner swim for his life than rejoin mankind, yet Don Pedro answers with patience, offers his own best clothes and coaxes him home to his family.

How does Gulliver spend his time after returning home from his last voyage?

Talking to the horses in his stables takes up at least four hours of his day, while he finds the very smell of his wife and children unbearable.

Which two subjects obsess the absent-minded people of Laputa, right down to the shapes of their food?

Mathematics and music: Gulliver is served mutton cut into a triangle and ducks trussed up like fiddles, yet a tailor who measures him with a quadrant makes a suit that does not fit.

Which London publisher first issued Gulliver's Travels in 1726, altering the text without Swift's consent?

Benjamin Motte toned down or cut the sharpest satire, which outraged Swift, and most of his changes were not undone until a Dublin edition of 1735.

Why did Swift have Gulliver's Travels sent to its publisher in secret?

He feared prosecution: the book was a thinly veiled attack on the Whig ministry, and even so its publisher cut the most dangerous passages before printing.

Which club of Tory satirists, with Swift among its members, may have planted the seed of Gulliver's Travels?

The Scriblerus Club planned the mock memoirs of an invented pedant, Martinus Scriblerus, complete with imaginary voyages, and Swift's share is thought to have grown into Gulliver.

Which poet had Swift to stay at his Twickenham villa in 1726 while Gulliver's Travels went to press?

Alexander Pope did more than play host that summer: he helped his friend arrange the book's secret publication and its sale to a London bookseller.

John Gay told Swift in 1726 that Gulliver's Travels was read 'from the cabinet-council to the' where?

Nursery: Gay's letter, written within weeks of publication, also reported that the whole first impression had sold in a week and that the town talked of nothing else.

Which Victorian novelist called the moral of Gulliver's Travels 'horrible, shameful, unmanly, blasphemous'?

William Thackeray said it in his lectures on the English humourists, aiming at the fourth voyage, and told his audience that Swift, giant though he was, should be hooted for it.

Laputa's astronomers in Gulliver's Travels know of two satellites circling which planet, 150 years before real ones were found?

Mars: Swift gave it two small, fast satellites in 1726, and after Phobos and Deimos were discovered in 1877, features on Phobos were named after characters from the book.

Which Hayao Miyazaki film takes part of its original title from a land in Gulliver's Travels?

Castle in the Sky came out in 1986 with the borrowed name in its title, which some English-language releases dropped because it reads as a Spanish obscenity.

Which language, studied by Swift at Trinity College Dublin, may underlie his Lilliputian words?

Irving Rothman argued that Lilliputian words derive from Hebrew, which Swift studied at Trinity College Dublin; Isaac Asimov's annotated edition had dismissed decoding them as a waste of time.

Having heard Gulliver describe Europe, the giant king calls its people 'the most pernicious race of little odious' what?

Vermin: the king adds 'that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth', a verdict the offended Gulliver puts down to the narrow views of a secluded prince.

Who starred as a modern-day Gulliver in the 2010 film version?

Jack Black plays Gulliver as a newspaper mailroom worker who is swept through the Bermuda Triangle to Lilliput, where Emily Blunt plays the princess.

Which actor played Gulliver in the 1996 television miniseries?

Ted Danson starred opposite his real-life wife, Mary Steenburgen, in a version that adds a plot Swift never wrote: Gulliver comes home and is locked up as a lunatic.

Which pioneering French filmmaker made a silent Gulliver film in 1902?

Georges Méliès made Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les géants in 1902, using trick photography to shrink and enlarge actors; Fleischer's animated feature followed in 1939.

What position did Swift hold at St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, from 1713?

Dean of St Patrick's from June 1713 until his death, Swift took the post as a consolation: he had hoped his work for the Tory ministry would earn him a bishopric in England.

Under which pseudonym did Swift write his letters attacking Wood's copper coinage for Ireland?

As M. B. Drapier, a supposed Dublin shopkeeper, Swift roused Ireland against the coinage so effectively that the patent was withdrawn, and he was hailed as a national hero.

What was Swift's nickname for Esther Johnson, the girl he tutored at Moor Park and was buried beside?

Swift called Esther Johnson Stella, addressing his Journal to Stella to her; 'Vanessa' was his name for the other Esther, Esther Vanhomrigh.

Which condition, marked by fits of vertigo, plagued Swift throughout his life?

Ménière's disease, an inner-ear disorder, is now thought to explain the giddiness that first struck Swift as a young man and dogged him for life; his final decline was long mistaken for madness.

Which 1729 satire by Swift coolly suggests that Ireland's poor sell their babies as food for the rich?

A Modest Proposal answers Irish poverty with deadpan arithmetic, reckoning that no gentleman would grudge ten shillings for a plump child that makes four dishes.

What did Swift call his aim in writing Gulliver's Travels?

To vex the world rather than divert it was, Swift told a friend while finishing the manuscript, the chief end of all his labours; the public was diverted regardless and bought up the first impression in a week.

What did Swift leave most of his fortune to found in Dublin?

A hospital for the mentally ill: Swift had joked in verse that he would give his wealth 'to build a house for fools and mad', and his will made the joke real as Dublin's St Patrick's Hospital.

What is the capital of Lilliput?

Mildendo, the Lilliputian capital, is an exact square five hundred feet on each side, with walls two and a half feet high; Gulliver steps over the western gate to view it.

The Lilliputians measure time in what unit?

The war with the neighbouring island has run for 'six and thirty moons', and the emperor is 'past his prime' before thirty.

How must visitors approach the King of Luggnagg when granted an audience?

Crawling and licking the floor is the court's literal rule, and the king rids himself of unwanted nobles by having the floor strewn with a deadly brown powder first.

Searching Gulliver's pockets, the Lilliputians conclude that which object is probably the god he worships?

His watch: they reason that it must be his god, or else some unknown animal, because he told them he seldom did anything without consulting it.

On Laputa, how do servants called flappers rouse their masters from deep thought?

By tapping them with a bladder: it is fastened to a stick and filled with dried peas, and struck on the mouth of whoever should speak and the ear of whoever should listen.

Gulliver's Travels came out seven years after which novel by Daniel Defoe?

Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719; Swift mimics its plain, factual manner, and the captain who tempts Gulliver back to sea for his third voyage is named Robinson.

How do the Lilliputians bury their dead, expecting the flat earth to flip over one day?

Head downward: they hold that the earth will one day turn upside down, so the dead will rise already standing on their feet, though their own scholars admit the doctrine is absurd.

Which scheme is pursued by a projector at the Grand Academy of Lagado?

Softening marble for pillows is typical of the Academy: none of its schemes has yet been brought to perfection, and while everyone waits the whole country lies waste.