The Origins of Gulliver’s Travels

Abstract

Until the publication of The Letters of Jonathan Swift to Charles Ford, literary scholars thought that Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels between 1715 and 1720, a period when he published almost nothing. His starting point was, they believed, sketches made up by the Scriblerus group — Pope, Swift, and others — in 1713 and 1714, and finally produced by Pope in 1741. Then D. Nichol Smith, in his edition of the Ford letters, proved that Swift wrote part I of Gulliver in about 1721–2, part II around 1722–3, part IV in 1723, and part III (after part IV) in 1724–5.² Swift continued to revise it, probably until it was published in the autumn of 1726.

Read, in a shortened form, before the International Association of University Professors of English (Jesus College, Cambridge, 23 Aug. 1956). I am indebted to Mr. Jonathan Wordsworth of Brasenose College, Oxford, for greatly improving the style of this paper. I have profited from the more general criticisms of Professor George Sherburn, who disagrees, however, with several of my conclusions.