[2] Brobdingnag is placed by Swift into the real world,[3] he describes its location and geography in Part II of Gullivers Travels and provides a map showing where it is.

The map printed at the beginning of Part II indicates that Brobdingnag is located on the northwest coast of North America, in probably what is now British Columbia.

[4] Gulliver states that a nine-year-old girl named Glumdalclitch, who teaches him the language, stands "not above 40 feet tall, being small for her age".

Gulliver also describes visiting the chief temple in Lorbrulgrud, whose tower was the highest in the kingdom, but reports he "came back disappointed, for the height is not above three thousand foot", which "allowing for the difference in size between those people and us in Europe" is "not equal in proportion to Salisbury steeple".

Outside world whales are stated to be of a size that one man can barely carry, and are eaten by common folk if they find a beached specimen.

It is described as a peninsula, terminated to the northeast by a range of volcanoes up to 30 miles (48 km) high separating the country from unknown land beyond.

Gulliver tells us that Lorbrulgrud was "situated near the middle of that empire" and was three thousand miles distant from the farmer's house on the coast, that the journey took ten weeks and that they "crossed five or six rivers many degrees broader and deeper than the Nile or the Ganges", and "there was hardly a rivulet smaller than the Thames at London Bridge".

Gulliver describes flies "as big as a Dunstable lark", and wasps the size of partridges, with stings "an inch and a half long, and sharp as needles".

Based on Gulliver's descriptions of their behaviour, the King describes the English as "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth".

The King of Brobdingnag is considered to be based on Sir William Steele, a statesman and writer, whom Swift worked for early in his career.

The mismatch between body sizes of Brobdingnag giants and Gulliver is the main feature of the plot: as Dr Johnson stated with some derision in 1775, "once you have thought of big and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest".

The scene of being found in Brobdingnag: emergence from the safe confines of the ship into the world of giants - screaming - being picked up and looked upon - reception by the family - is an allusion to birth.

The travel to Brobdingnag exposes the lack of maturity: Gulliver has to be saved by Brobdingnagians not just from the danger of the oversized world around him, but from his own follies: quarreling with a "dwarf", suggesting the King to use gunpowder on his subjects, seeing his own smallness, but overlooking narrowmindedness.

[9] Brobdingnag can be interpreted as an outsider's view of England (the farther he goes away, the closer he comes to the own country, seen from a different perspective[8]), while Gulliver's travel is similar to a life story of an English gentlemen of the time.

[13] The king's speech balloon in the top half of the print reads "My little friend Grildrig,[Note 1] you have made a most admirable panegyric upon Yourself and Country, but from what I can gather from your own relation & the answers I have with much pains wringed & extorted from you, I cannot but conclude you to be one of the most pernicious, little-odious-reptiles, that nature ever suffer'd to crawl upon the surface of the Earth".