By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships is a 1726 prose satire[1][2] by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, satirising both human nature and the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre.

Here, he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing ship, which safely takes him back home with some Lilliputian animals he carries with him.

Between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with the King of Brobdingnag.

Gulliver tours Balnibarbi, the kingdom ruled from Laputa, as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by the blind pursuit of science without practical results, in a satire on bureaucracy and on the Royal Society and its experiments.

At the Grand Academy of Lagado in Balnibarbi, great resources and manpower are employed on researching preposterous schemes such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble for use in pillows, learning how to mix paint by smell, and uncovering political conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons.

On Glubbdubdrib, he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the "ancients versus moderns" theme in the book.

[5] Gulliver becomes a member of a horse's household and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their way of life, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them.

He returns to his home in England, but is unable to reconcile himself to living among "Yahoos" and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.

suggest as early as 1713 when Swift, Gay, Pope, Arbuthnot and others formed the Scriblerus Club with the aim of satirising popular literary genres.

[6] According to these accounts, Swift was charged with writing the memoirs of the club's imaginary author, Martinus Scriblerus, and also with satirising the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre.

By August 1725 the book was complete; and as Gulliver's Travels was a transparently anti-Whig satire, it is likely that Swift had the manuscript copied so that his handwriting could not be used as evidence if a prosecution should arise, as had happened in the case of some of his Irish pamphlets (the Drapier's Letters).

[7] Motte, recognising a best-seller but fearing prosecution, cut or altered the worst offending passages (such as the descriptions of the court contests in Lilliput and the rebellion of Lindalino), added some material in defence of Queen Anne to Part II, and published it.

The five-paragraph episode in Part III, telling of the rebellion of the surface city of Lindalino against the flying island of Laputa, was an allegory of the affair of Drapier's Letters of which Swift was proud.

Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands.

Allan Bloom asserts that Swift's lampooning of the experiments of Laputa is the first questioning by a modern liberal democrat of the effects and cost on a society which embraces and celebrates policies pursuing scientific progress.

[10] Swift wrote: The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places.

He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.

He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me "to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers".

I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.A possible reason for the book's classic status is that it can be seen as many things to many people.

One of the most cited examples of this comes from Gulliver's description of a Brobdingnagian woman: I must confess no Object ever disgusted me so much as the Sight of her monstrous Breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious Reader an Idea of its Bulk, Shape, and Colour....

This open critique towards aspects of the female body is something that Swift often brings up in other works of his, particularly in poems such as The Lady's Dressing Room and A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed.

[11] A criticism of Swift's use of misogyny by Felicity A. Nussbaum proposes the idea that "Gulliver himself is a gendered object of satire, and his antifeminist sentiments may be among those mocked".

[17] Along similar lines, Crane holds that Gulliver's misanthropy is developed in part when he talks to the Houyhnhnms about mankind because the discussions lead him to reflect on his previously held notion of humanity.

From reading travel books, Swift’s contemporaries were accustomed to beast-like figures of foreign places; thus, Stone holds that the creation of the Yahoos was not out of the ordinary for the time period.

From this playing off of familiar genre expectations, Stone deduces that the parallels that Swift draws between the Yahoos and humans is meant to be humorous rather than cynical.

Furthermore, "A. E. Case, acting on a tipoff offered by the word 'projectors,' found [the Academy] to be the hiding place of many of those speculators implicated in the South Sea Bubble.

However, Irving Rothman, a professor at University of Houston, points out that the language may have been derived from Hebrew, which Swift had studied at Trinity College Dublin.

[25] James Beattie commended Swift’s work for its "truth" regarding the narration and claims that "the statesman, the philosopher, and the critick, will admire his keenness of satire, energy of description, and vivacity of language", noting that even children can enjoy the novel.

[25] British novelist and journalist William Makepeace Thackeray described Swift's work as "blasphemous", saying its critical view of mankind was ludicrous and overly harsh.

[28] It has been pointed out that the long and vicious war which started after a disagreement about which was the best end to break an egg is an example of the narcissism of small differences, a term Sigmund Freud coined in the early 1900s.