Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Paul Turner
Since its first publication in 1726, Gulliver's Travels has remained an undisputed classic. George Orwell rated it among the six most indispensable books in world literature.
Gulliver travels to four extraordinary places. In the first, people are five or six inches tall, in the second, sixty or seventy feet. The third is a kind of satellite inhabited by absurdly impractical scientists, and the fourth is a country governed by horses who treat humans as filthy animals. By turns exciting and comic, Gulliver's fantastic adventures were read, in the words of Gay, 'from the cabinet-council to the Nursery', as a travel book and as a powerful satire on human nature.
The text is based on that of 1735, incorporating revisions by Swift of the first edition.