Gulliver's Travels

The ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver sails from England on four voyages and is cast among the tiny Lilliputians, the giant Brobdingnagians, the mad projectors of flying Laputa, and the rational horses called Houyhnhnms, each a mirror held up to human folly. Swift frames the satire from a real England, and even gives his imaginary lands pseudo-coordinates, so that Gulliver departs from London's docks toward islands placed off Sumatra, the Pacific, Japan and the southern oceans.

Gulliver

Redriff, London

The departures

Between his voyages Gulliver returns to his home and family at Redriff by the Thames, the ordinary English base from which he keeps restlessly putting to sea. Swift grounds the fantastical travels in this real dockside London, lending his ship's-surgeon narrator a plain, credible voice that makes the wonders, and the satire, land the harder.

The frame

explicit Gulliver lives at Redriff (Rotherhithe) by the London docks, from which he sets out on each voyage; sited in that real riverside district.

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