 In a sentence or two, summarize each bold, head-lined section.
Gulliver's Travels: Historical Context
England in the 1720s
While Swift was writing Gulliver's Travels in the 1720s, England was undergoing a lot of political
shuffling. George I, a Hanoverian prince of Germany, had ascended the British throne in 1714 after the
death of Queen Anne ended the Stuart line. Although he was not a bad or repressive king, he was
unpopular. King George had gained his throne with the assistance of the Whig party, and his Whig
ministers subsequently used their considerable gains in power to oppress members of the opposition
Tory party. Swift had been a Tory since 1710, and bitterly resented the Whig actions against his friends,
who often faced exile or worse. Understanding how events in Europe and England led to this political
rivalry can help the reader of Swift's novel better understand his satire.
The Restoration
The Restoration era began in 1660, a few years before Swift was born. At this time Charles Stuart (King
Charles II) became king of England, restoring the Protestant Stuart family to the throne. Charles II
supported a strong Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church. He was supported by the
Tories, a political party made up mostly of church officials and landowning noblemen. Protestants who
did not support the Anglican church teamed with Roman Catholics to form the opposing Whig party.
The main source of contention between the parties was the Test Act of 1673, which forced all
government employees to receive communion according to the Anglican church's customs. In effect, this
prevented non-Anglicans from holding government jobs. Swift himself supported the act, and even
switched from Whig to Tory in 1710 because he believed a strong Church of England was necessary to
keep the balance of power in the government. Throughout his life, he felt that institutions such as the
church and government had to be strong in order to rein in people's tendency toward chaos and sin; he
explored this idea in Gulliver's Travels. Over the years, however, Swift came to believe the Tories were
as much to blame as the Whigs for engaging in partisan politics, locking horns over minor issues and
bringing the government to a stalemate. Whenever one party was in favor with the reigning king and in
power in the Parliament, it attacked the other party, exiling and imprisoning the opposition's members.
Swift satirized their selfish and petty politics in Part I of Gulliver's Travels, where the Lilliputian heir
(who represented George II, the future king of England) has to hobble about with one short heel and one
high as a compromise between the two parties that wear different heights of heels.
The Glorious Revolution and War of Spanish Succession
Charles II' s brother King James II, a Catholic, came to the British throne in 1685. He immediately
repealed the Test Act and began to hire Whigs for his government. The Anglican-dominated Parliament
secretly negotiated with William of Orange, the Protestant Dutch husband of James's Protestant daughter
Mary, to take over the throne. In December 1688, William did so, and James II fled to France without a
fight. This was called the Glorious Revolution because no one was killed in the coup.
Soon after King William III and Queen Mary II came to power, the Catholic Louis XIV of France
declared war on Spain over trade and religious issues. William entered the war on the side of Spain, a
war the English called William's War. This conflict was satirized by Swift in the war between the
Lilliputians (England) and Blefuscudians (England with the Spanish, Dutch, and Germans as allies) was
fighting France, it was also warring with Ireland. Irish Catholics wanted freedom from British rule, and
England feared that France could invade their country through a sympathetic Ireland. Peace came about
in 1697, but England got almost none of the spoils of war—land in Spain. In order to appear strong,
William declared war again, this time on the Spanish and the French. This began the War of Spanish
Succession.
In 1702 William died and his daughter Queen Anne ascended the throne. The war waged on while at
home the Whigs and Tories fought amongst themselves. Many of the Whigs were merchants who were
profiting from the war, and they wanted the fighting to continue. The landowning Tories wanted the war
to cease, because it devalued their property. Swift helped the Tories in their efforts to stop the war by
becoming editor of their newspaper, the Examiner. His influential writings, along with his friend
Bolingbroke's secret negotiations with France, helped end the war in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht.
Queen Anne seemed ungrateful for these efforts, as she later exiled Bolingbroke and destroyed Swift's
chances of a career in the Church of England. Swift was forced to return to Ireland to find a job as an
Anglican priest.
Ireland
Catholic Ireland had been dominated by the British since the fifteenth century, because England had
always been paranoid about a French or Spanish invasion coming through Catholic Ireland. England's
restrictive policies had driven Ireland and its people into poverty, which angered Swift. He was incensed
when the scientist Sir Isaac Newton, given the task of overseeing the economics of Ireland, supported a
currency law that would further destroy the economy of the Irish. His anonymously written The
Drapier's Letters, inspired the Irish people to unite against England and force the law to be repealed.
The Irish protected Swift's anonymity, and for his role, Swift is a hero in Ireland to this day.
The Enlightenment
In the midst of all this political back and forth, the optimistic Age of Enlightenment was flourishing.
Intellectuals, philosophers, and scientists such as John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton were
opening the doors to exploration in many fields, asking new questions, and experimenting. They
discarded the old idea that man is by nature sinful because of Adam and Eve's fall from grace in the
Garden of Eden. Man's ability to reason, they claimed, could save him from his tendency to sin. Man
could create a utopia, or perfect society, that solved the problems of humankind. Swift vehemently
disagreed. He felt that reason could just as easily be misused for foolish or selfish purposes as good
ones, and man could never rise above the tendency toward sin to be able to create utopia on earth. His
satire of the folly of Enlightenment scientific and theological musings and experiments in Part III of
Gulliver's Travels is followed by his portrayal of a utopian society, the Houyhnhnm's, into which man
can never fit.
Source: Novels for Students, ©2013 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved.Full copyright.
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