A children’s classic?

Abstract

It may be helpful to begin by recalling two of the valuable points made by Angus Ross in his short study of Gulliver’s Travels (1968). He suggests that if the book is deficient as a work of fiction it is because its imaginative centre is not the narrative itself but argument. This leads him to associate it not with the mainstream of prose fiction, nor with works of formal philosophy, but with works such as Paradise Lost, More’s Utopia and Johnson’s Rasselas, which, combining fictionality with abstract discourse, ‘imaginatively present views of the world to thinking men’. He acknowledges however, that the Travels also appeals to the part of us which is ‘satisfied by fairy tales, by eyes as big as saucers, by the bean-stalk or by Pinocchio’s nose growing inexorably longer, like a tree twig’ (p.21). In Ross’s account there may be a tension but ultimately no contradiction between the presentation of ideas and the telling of a captivating story, for the second subserves the first by endowing the argument with dramatic and symbolic significance — a fact which he underlines in his close readings of the text. The two aspects are not always held in balance so carefully: the ideas are so absorbing and their working out so complex, that there is always the danger that when we write about it (though not as we read it) we shall neglect the book’s quality as a work of the fictional imagination and thus leave out of account an important constituent of the experience of reading it. What I would wish to reaffirm is that Swift’s skill