Travels into several remote Nations of the World.

2 volumes in octavo: I/ (1) leaf for the portrait, XII and 148 pp., (3) leaves, 164 pp. and 2 plates; II/ (3) leaves, 154 pp., (4) leaves, 199 pp. and 4 plates.

Later calf, double cold-tooled border framing the covers, raised bands with spines richly decorated with gilt motifs and fillets, red morocco title labels, black morocco volume numbering labels, decorated board edges, marbled edges. Later binding in imitation style.

195 x 123 mm.

Swift, Jonathan. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships.

London, printed for Benj. Motte, 1726.

First edition. Second issue.

Teerinck’s AA edition.

It is embellished with a portrait frontispiece of Gulliver engraved by Sheppard after Sturte (in the second state, as is most often the case, the legend in an oval frame, the Latin inscription below), 5 maps, and one engraving.

Teerinck, 290; ESTC T139450; Rothschild, 2107; PMM, 185.

“In 1726 came Gulliver’s Travels which achieved immediate success (…). Gulliver’s Travels has achieved the final apotheosis of the satirical fable, but it has also become a tale for children. For every edition designed for the reader with an eye to historical background, twenty have appeared, abridged or adapted; for readers who care nothing for the satire and enjoy it as a first-class story” (PMM).

The novel is composed of four parts or journeys. In the first, Gulliver, a surgeon aboard a merchant ship, recounts how he was shipwrecked and landed on the island of Lilliput, whose inhabitants measured about six inches tall. (…) Finally, Gulliver recounts his fourth and last voyage “to the country of the Houyhnhnm,” the good and virtuous horses who keep the human species under their control: the latter is represented by the Yahoos, repugnant and degenerate beings bearing the marks of the worst bestiality.

The satirical violence of this last part gives full meaning to Gulliver’s Travels, making it a somber and powerful work of painful pessimism, yet devoid of the slightest resignation.

“Swift’s work constitutes an enigma as great, if not greater than More’s Utopia.

One need only look at the extreme diversity and vehemence of the reactions it provoked from the moment it appeared.

For the most part, readers more or less accepted the satire Swift directed at the customs and institutions of his time in the first three books, but were repelled by the misanthropy that, to them, seemed revealed in the fourth book. (…)

For any of Swift’s British contemporaries, the target and scope of the satire could not be in doubt. The conflict between the two tiny empires unmistakably alluded to the wars fought by the English against France at the beginning of the century.

More generally, to use Jeffrey Hopes’ words, “it is expansionist and conquering Britain that is represented—self-assured, but made ridiculous by her smallness.” The satire of British imperialism, and more broadly the conquering passions of eighteenth-century European monarchs, continues very clearly in the second and third books of the Travels.” (F. Knopper, A. Ruiz).

A beautiful copy, clean and with wide margins.