Chapter 7 - Travel Writing

Summary

When, on 28 October 1726, the Travels of a certain Lemuel Gulliver came out, its author couldn’t have made a better choice to attract a large audience when he gave his most famous satire the framework of a travel account, one of the most popular genres of the time. Swift was an avid reader of travel books himself, and from his reading he was able to endow Gulliver with the characteristics of a life-like traveller and enrich his account with numerous topical elements the reader would recognize as typical of the genre. Whether all these parallels and similarities were actually sources in the sense that Swift’s imagination fed on them is not really important. What matters is the fact that the reader met with authentic elements she was accustomed to when she expected to read a travel book. Swift employed this strategy of authentification in the Travels in order to increase the impact of the satiric shock of his attack on the political and human corruptions of his time. They were also a clever sham, a wild goose chase with deceptive potential, playing on the gullibility of the readers, who had no way of verifying Gulliver’s account unless they set sail themselves.