Gulliver's Travels turns 300 with events in Ireland and a fresh look at its Anglo-Irish roots

Left · 2Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, was first published on 28 October 1726, so the book turns 300 this year. 1 2 Left · 2Swift was Irish-born and Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin when he wrote it. 1 2 Left · 1According to the Guardian, in March 1726 Swift visited London and had a courier deliver the manuscript to a publisher at night, hoping to publish anonymously under the title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. 2

Left · 1The publisher, Benjamin Motte, did not know the author's identity, but the book's success and Swift's literary record led many to guess it, said Trinity College Dublin professor Aileen Douglas. 2 Left · 1The Guardian reports the anniversary is being celebrated at Trinity College Dublin and around Ireland with exhibitions, festivals, seminars, art competitions and workshops. The Trinity exhibition, co-curated by Stephanie Breen and Aileen Douglas, runs until December and is online, drawing on hundreds of editions including a 1976 Marvel comic and the only known surviving copy of an abridgement printed in 1761. 2 Left · 1Other events include a Trinity panel on art challenging power, a premiere by composer Seán Doherty with readings by Swift scholar Brendan Twomey at the cathedral, and an exhibition and lecture series at the Robinson library in County Armagh running until December. 2

Left · 1Douglas said Laputa's engine producing tracts without 'genius or study' resonates with present anxieties about technology, and the Guardian notes the book's retelling through a feminist lens, including works imagining the voice of Gulliver's wife Mary. 2 Left · 1In The Conversation, University College Cork lecturer Clíona Ó Gallchoir argues the text was shaped by Swift's experience as a member of Ireland's Protestant elite, a minority who saw themselves as bringing civilisation to Ireland yet were treated as inferior in England. 1 Left · 1She cites Swift's 1724 Drapier's Letters ('Am I a freeman in England, and do I become a slave in six hours by crossing the Channel?') and reads the Brobdingnag king's verdict on the English, and the Laputa satire of the Royal Society, as undermining English claims to superiority. 1

Left · 1She reads Gulliver's final madness, preferring horses to his family, as a metaphor for the Anglo-Irish dilemma of a colonial population allied with a power that despises it, though she says Swift's achievement is broader, giving a dual perspective on the folly of one frame of reference. 1 Left · 2Both pieces link the book to Swift's A Modest Proposal, which proposed selling Irish children as food. 2 1