Some circumstances of composition

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships was substantially written between 1721 and 1725 and first published in 1726. The history of the actual composition of the book is evidenced in Swift's correspondence and that of his friends. Empiricist historical criticism of Gulliver's Travels attempts to recover the meanings the text had for Swift and his readers in the early Hanoverian period. Reactivating the political meanings of Swift's satiric text and its contexts means exhuming some neglected polemicists and ephemeral literary production. Reading Gulliver's Travels alongside political works and writers privileged in modern conceptual analyses of eighteenth-century political literature and thought (such as Bolingbroke's Craftsman, Trenchard and Gordon's Cato's Letters, Locke, the canonical authors of civic humanism) modern Swift criticism has occluded the presence in Swift's book of some fugitive militant voices from the contemporary paper wars. Swift's political circumstances and whereabouts during the period of Gulliver's composition are also of significant contextual interest for an intentionalist and historicist interpretation of the book's politics. Swift's partisan ‘Posture’, Tory milieu and connections in the period of Gulliver's composition will be remarked briefly here before the historical character of the book's political discourse is discussed.

Swift's first reference to Gulliver's Travels in his correspondence is in a letter to Charles Ford of 15 April 1721 (Corr, II, 379–81).