Since its first publication in 1726, Gulliver's Travels has remained an undisputed dassic. George Orwell rated it among the six most indispensable books in world literature.

Gulliver travels to four extraordinary places. In the first, people are five or six inches tall, in the second, sixty or seventy feet. The third is a kind of satellite inhabited by absurdly impractical scientists, and the fourth is a country governed by horses who treat humans as filthy animals. By turns exciting and comic, Gulliver's fantastic adventures were read, in the words of Gay, 'from the cabinet-council to the Nursery" as a travel book and as a powerful satire on human nature.

The text is based on that of 1735, incorporating revisions by Swift of the first edition.

Gulliver's Travels is not one of those books which 'the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again'.1 It was a bestseUer when it first came out in 1726, and people have been reading it for pleasure, not merely for profit, ever since. George Orwell read it first just before he was 8, re-read it at least haft a dozen times during his short life, and found it 'impossible to grow tired of'. 'If I were to make a list', he wrote, 'of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.'2

Abbreviations

Introduction

Note on the Text

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of Jonathan Swift

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A Letter from Captain Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson

The Publisher to the Reader

A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT

A VOYAGE TO BROBDINGNAG

A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA,

  BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG,

  GLUBBDUBDRIB, AND JAPAN

A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF

  THE HOUYHNHNMS

Explanatory Notes