The Background of Gulliver's Travels: Voyages, Geographers, and Travel Writing

1.2 Voyages, Geographers, and Travel Writing: The Background of Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels as a Literary Synthesis

Gulliver’s Travels is a synthesis of many kinds of literature:

• Genuine accounts of travel
• Imaginative combinations of realism and fantasy
• Outright fantastic voyages
• Utopian and dystopian fables

The essential fact to grasp is that in the early modern period (1500–1750) preceding Gulliver’s Travels, there was no absolute distinction between the fantastic and the real. To some, Gulliver's Travels was immediately perceived as a satirical fantasy; yet to others, it seemed remarkably real.

Swift’s friend, the scientist and satirist John Arbuthnot, wrote that this book could be read by everybody, but that readers were often confounded because Gulliver was said to have lived in Wapping, not Rotherhithe. He even noted that an old man borrowed this book and went looking for Lilliput on a map.

At the end of the book, Gulliver insists that he is telling the truth. The allusions made here direct us to a vast body of travel literature that drew in part on a long-established tradition of geography and natural history.

The Body of Travel Literature

The contemporary travel literature tradition encompassed several categories:

• Accounts of actual voyages written by those who undertook them.
• Reports of stories told to (but not directly experienced by) genuine voyagers.
• Fictional stories drawing on first-hand reports of voyages believed to be real, presenting a mixture of fact and fantasy.
• Apparently true stories based on actual voyages, but embellished with the added sensationalism of the fantastic.
• Tales of imaginary voyages, grounding utopian fictions in authentic materials from actual voyages.

Prominent Examples and Literary Hoaxes

Daniel Defoe and Madagascar

An illustrative case is Daniel Defoe’s Madagascar: or Robert Drury’s Journal, during Fifteen Years Captivity on that Island (1729). Just as Defoe took the story of Alexander Selkirk’s experience as a primary source for Robinson Crusoe (1719), he expanded on a newspaper report of an abandoned ship’s boy, adding adventures and local realism drawn from other voyages to produce Madagascar. Madagascar was accepted as authentic until the late 19th century and was read more than any other contemporary description of the island. Defoe obtained detailed information from sailors regarding the language and customs of Madagascar, including particulars not recorded anywhere else.

George Psalmanazar and Formosa

Another striking case is George Psalmanazar, who published An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704). In the preface, the author explicitly repudiated the “Romantic Stories” and “Fabulous Reports” of the East, presenting instead what seemed to be a meticulous account of Formosa—including its language, customs, society, agriculture, and religion.

Psalmanazar became a major London celebrity and, posing as a convert to Christianity, was even sent to Oxford to teach Formosan (which was suspiciously similar to Greek) to aspiring missionaries. Embarrassingly, the whole affair was an elaborate imposture: whoever Psalmanazar really was (supposedly a Frenchman), he had fabricated everything from whole cloth.

Conclusion

The fabrications of Defoe, Psalmanazar, and others strove to reproduce the realism of actual contemporary voyage literature, which was based largely on empirical observation and the testimony of indigenous peoples. During this era, reading was fundamentally conditioned by a fragile balance between credulity and skepticism.