'Depicts humanity at its most grotesque': Why the 300-year-old novel Gulliver's Travels is so misunderstood

First published in 1726, Jonathan Swift's adventure novel has been chopped, changed and adapted ever since. Is it a "misanthropic satire" or a "fantastical nursery tale"?

You may be familiar with the story of Lemuel Gulliver. He wakes up after a shipwreck only to be pinned down by ropes and surrounded by tiny Lilliputians, who clamber up to the incapacitated adventurer.

It's a scene that's been replicated and satirised ever since Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726, 300 years ago.

Yet fewer may know of Gulliver's darker exploits, where the voyaging anti-hero encounters scientists inserting bellows into dogs, or the society of enlightened-yet-murderous talking horses, the Houyhnhnms, who calmly debate eradicating the Yahoos, their brutish human-like cohabitants.

In the three centuries since Swift set out to "vex the world, rather than divert it", as he wrote, two Gullivers have competed for the public imagination: one, the excoriating, misanthropic satire that sends up the Crown, the Church and English politics, and the other, a fantastical nursery tale of an adventurer navigating worlds big and small.

Packed with toilet humour, the original Gulliver's Travels also takes aim at the legal system, colonialism and, ultimately, human nature. It darkly concludes with a Gulliver so disgusted by humans after meeting the rational Houyhnhnms that he spends his final days locked in a stable with a horse.

From its very first edition, Swift's tale has been chopped and changed, adapted and altered. Eventually, the story became larger than life, much like Gulliver in the land of Lilliput.

"It's perhaps one of the most adapted texts in the world," says Daniel Cook, author of Gulliver's Afterlives: 300 Years of Transmedia Adaptation. It has sparked spin-offs, illustrations, plays and films, all contributing to a broad "Gulliveriana". The titular antihero has appeared in Doctor Who and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; he's met Tony Blair, and appears everywhere from family-friendly Disney romps to Soviet critiques of capitalism.

And of all the adaptations, it was those that simplified and sanitised the tale that endured most in the popular imagination, where the darkest episodes were edited, abridged or expunged.

"I doubt Swift would've envisaged Gulliver's Travels would last to the 21st Century, in the form we know it now," says Abigail Williams, professor of English at King's College, London, who once enlisted her infant son and an FBI analyst to decrypt nonsense words in Swift's letters. "Swift intended Gulliver's Travels to be a series of topical and general satires on humankind, not a kind of adventure."

"That's the really extraordinary thing," she adds. "He's taking the mick out of [adventure stories], but takes enough energy from them that Gulliver's Travels becomes an adventure story in its own right."

Swift's peer and friend John Gay famously described the novel as "universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery". Upon its pseudonymous publication in 1726 – a precautionary manoeuvre given its outrageous content – the story was a hit, and the first run quickly sold out. Its fantastical elements appealed to young readers just as its cynical mockeries of humankind did to the literati. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire was in London and greatly enjoyed Gulliver's Travel – it influenced his own satirical Bildungsroman (coming-of age story), Candide.

Yet the tale was already being altered. Publisher Benjamin Motte added in defences of the reigning Queen Anne and removed some of the more quarrelsome political screeds. The reproduction of Gulliver's Travels through inexpensive booklets, called chapbooks, further simplified and changed Swift's story. "For most people, the book was pretty expensive when it first appeared," says Williams. These chapbooks, however, were an unexpected, roaring success with younger audiences.

Half-a-century later, a publisher spotted an opportunity. Two decades after Swift died in 1776, Francis Newbery released an abridgement that boiled the story down even further. He cut out the land of Laputa, whose daft experiments in extracting sunbeams from cucumbers lampooned the scientific work of the Royal Society, and the talking-horse Houyhnhnms entirely.

This edition was more swashbuckling fairy-tale fare than satire, focusing on Gulliver's capers among the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians. Younger audiences, perhaps appropriately, would not read of the small Gulliver noticing pockmarks and sores on the gigantic Brobdingnagians (or his allusions to being used to pleasure the queen's chambermaids), nor his efforts in putting out a Lilliputian palace fire by urinating on it. Though scenes like these "carried on the great scatological tradition seen in Shakespeare and Chaucer", says Cook, they were, perhaps appropriately, deemed unfit for children.

By the 1790s, abridgements became the norm, with Gulliver's Travels becoming a much bigger hit in continental Europe than in England. "It was adapted into German, French, and Spanish very quickly," says Cook, "and they tended to use the simplified version. There's a crossing of language barriers."

Over time, cultural and religious views stratified Gulliver's Travels even further, on the one hand a bizarre parody full of body horror and the other a whimsical nursery tale.

Though the Victorians were not nearly as priggish as is assumed, they "largely loathed Gulliver," says Grant. Particularly rankling was the idea that humanity could be reduced to the brutish Yahoos in the land of the Houyhnhnms. In his 1853 book The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, Vanity Fair novelist William Makepeace Thackeray described the book as "filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, and obscene". The Victorian author and critic Edmund Gosse concluded that Swift's "misanthropic genius" could only have been conceived by a diseased mind: "His vertigo became chronic, and so did his misanthropy... there is something which suggests a brain not wholly under control."

"The Victorians thought it was un-Christian, they hated the scatology and sexual elements, and they hated that bleak and persistent misanthropy," says historian Hester Grant. "So I think they were largely responsible for expurgating and stripping the ugly, as they perceived it, satire, and leaving this lovely, clean work of the imagination."

This fourth voyage was viewed as a "complete attack on humanity", according to Cook, and its seemingly irreligious nature was what really shocked people. "It's Swift saying we are like the Yahoos," Cook says. "People thought making fun of the pettiness of politicians in voyage one was fine. We all know politicians are useless. But it's the fourth voyage where he's attacking the very basis of what it means to be a human being. It's no coincidence that, when we think about the children's version of Gulliver's Travels, it's just the first two voyages. We don't really get the full adaptation."

Swift penned his own epitaph, which read: "Where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart". Fantastical and imaginative though Gulliver's Travels was, there's no getting away from that sense of indignation fuelling the tale.

Like the war that rages in the story between "Big-endian" and "Little-endian" factions, the supposed misanthropy of Jonathan Swift is the subject of intense academic debate. There are those, like Thackeray, who believe Swift really did hate humankind, while others view the witless character of Gulliver as the object of satire.

Gulliver's Travels was a late-career magnum opus for Swift, who'd long been a formidable satirist and political propagandist for the Conservatives in Westminster. He felt these were his glory years, when he wrote influential political pamphlets and rubbed shoulders with Tory grandees.

This charmed life died with Queen Anne in 1714, when the ministry he served collapsed. Swift "mourned the loss of political power," says Grant, and above all felt hard done by. Having hoped for a cosy senior position in the Church of England, he was instead rewarded with the deanship of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, which Swift viewed practically as exile. "That feeds very much into Gulliver's Travels, with all its satire of courts and talk of ingratitude and betrayal," says Grant.

Though the writer was born in Dublin, Swift had a complicated relationship with Ireland, calling his home country a "wretched, dirty, dog-hole and prison" and "a place good enough to die in". But he also became a champion of Irish autonomy against England, reflected in political and parts of Gulliver's Travels – such as the flying island of Laputa keeping the Balnibarbi below in check, by threatening to crush revolts in their capital of Lindalino, a stand-in for Dublin.

This was all too controversial for Motte's first edition, which removed that critique on colonial subjugation. But Grant believes this is evidence that Swift was a reformer, who wanted to change the world through satire, rather than criticising humankind in a vacuum.

"He depicts humanity at its most grotesque because he wanted to shake his reader from the inertia that allows man to go about our everyday lives when terrible things are happening all around," says Grant. "He's beating us around the head, saying, 'this is what you're like, go do something about it.'"

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The legacy of Gulliver's Travels now towers as tall as a Brobdingnagian giant. It is one of the most studied English books of all time, yet possibly one of the least understood due to its many sanitised adaptations. Its language has entered the lexicon, and been further adapted in the digital age, with the "endianness" of computer bytes and the search engine Yahoo. Even AI seemed to have been predicted, in a sense, with a great hand-cranked "knowledge engine" that produces books and mathematics without any expertise on behalf of the user.

It may have been the horrors of the 20th Century that put the original voyages back under the lens. Titans of literature from George Orwell to Sylvia Plath all referenced the text; Orwell called Swift a "Tory anarchist" who, with his "rancorous, pessimistic" fable, foresaw modern totalitarianism in the joyless dystopia of the Houyhnhnms.

Whether the original satire or its many bowdlerised editions, and whatever Swift's original intentions, Gulliver's Travels became much larger than itself. Rudyard Kipling said that Swift "tried to bring an indictment against all humanity, but left a book for children".

But perhaps Swift would have been both amused and dismayed by the endless debate and mutations of his picaresque tale.

"I think he would despair," says Williams. "He was so critical of the dumbing down of contemporary culture. But it's also a text that really plays with misunderstanding, like a lot of Swift's writing.

"Maybe Swift would be delighted by the fact that it was being misunderstood."

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