Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

This is a book of two halves. The recurring signpost of it being a satire is really only fulfilled in the second half. While the accounts of his visiting Lilliput and Brobdingrag (not Brobdingnag - a letter attached to the end insists that the foolish typesetters got it wrong!) may have a slight wash of satire backing them, they are mainly and effectively fantasy. The satire kicks in with the third journey, the one to Laputa, and reaches an apogee in the last, the stay in Houyhnhnmland. So, what comes up immediately for me is - what happened? I wonder if there is a documented history of the writing of this book, and an explication of exactly what turned Swift a little curdled halfway through and completely sour near the end? It definitely has that feel; the reader can sense a Smollettian (before Smollett) rage with many or most of the 'professions' as they were then practiced, a disgust with charlatanism, and what it reveals about us philosophically. But also in the story of the Houyhnhnms the rapier goes deeper - it's misanthropy, pure and simple. The typification of humans as Yahoos, and the use of the term as a biological grouping, giving it that sense of distance and scientific quiescence, is splendidly damning. We are all just incapable, voracious, ignoble filth to Gulliver's mind by the end, and I'm reckoning a goodly quantity of Swift's. It's also really interesting to think about what concentrated his attention on horses as a perfect contrast. It smacks of a kind of depressed desperation somehow, a grasping in a state of misery. But it makes for a striking book.