My undergraduates and I spend two weeks with Gulliver’s Travels on one of my third-year option modules, The English Novel (pre-1900), at Dundee. In fact, we open with Swift, largely because we proceed chronologically onwards to (typically) Richardson, Henry or Sarah Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Charlotte Brontё, and Dickens, but also because I get to exclaim, gleefully, that critical consensus compels me to say that, even if it looks like an English novel, Gulliver’s Travels is neither English (it’s Irish or, at least, Anglo-Irish) nor a novel (it’s a prose satire, or perhaps, as one of my postgraduate students once suggested, a collection of short stories). Scottish and Irish literature (largely in English and Scots, with the other languages given in dual translations where possible) feature prominently throughout our courses, which means our students are familiar with issues surrounding the literary canon of Britain and Ireland in the setting of a Scottish university. As a department we also spend a lot of time with meta-fiction, genre, and intertextuality. Taking such a background for granted allows me to invite students to read Swift’s text as a response to Robinson Crusoe, which they all read in their freshman year, or as a precursor to A Modest Proposal, which closes our Early Modern Literature core module. Where possible, I aim to introduce students to the Duchess of Newcastle’s The Blazing World and other seventeenth-century precursors to Gulliver’s Travels, but Defoe’s work has been more readily available to them during their time here.

When addressing in class Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels – with all of this in mind – we jump straight to our hero’s encounter with the Yahoos. There is, I think, a danger of collectively falling into overly abstract debates about the humanness of the Yahoos. Often we’ll confront the critical context of Swift’s possible anti-Irishness, as this is a significant theme of the book and the author’s broader corpus, by refracting it through, say, literary anti-Celticism at large. “Yahoo,” as one of my students recently remarked, does sound like a Scots word, after all. Swift’s residence in Scottified Armagh when working on Gulliver’s Travels might have influenced his take on his satirical humanoids, too. But an intertextual approach, I find, works well as a way of grounding the po-facedly parodic qualities of Swift’s writing, particularly in terms of racial, national, and gender profiling.

Framing the discussion by recalling Robinson’s observations of the indigenous people from afar (“it was not my Business to meddle with them, unless they first attack’d me”) in language that is at once disengaged and yet wilfully hostile, I invite students to scrutinize Swift’s version of a similar confrontation. Indeed, on their own, students often latch onto the shared colonialist paranoia of the novels’ protagonists, such as Gulliver’s observation of “many tracts of human feet,” which obviously recalls Robinson’s shock at seeing the man-made footprint on the sand:

I walked very circumspectly, for fear of being surprised, or suddenly shot with an arrow from behind, or on either side. I fell into a beaten road, where I saw many tracts of human feet, and some of cows, but most of horses. At last I beheld several animals in a field, and one or two of the same kind sitting in trees. Their shape was very singular and deformed, which a little discomposed me, so that I lay down behind a thicket to observe them better.

Robinson carries guns, Gulliver fears arrows; in each case, they’re projecting their own anxieties on their new surroundings. “The ugly monster, when he saw me, distorted several ways, every feature of his visage, and stared, as at an object he had never seen before,” writes Gulliver. He continues: “then approaching nearer, lifted up his fore-paw, whether out of curiosity or mischief I could not tell; but I drew my hanger, and gave him a good blow with the flat side of it.” The Yahoo, to Gulliver’s mind, might display the noble curiosity of a Westerner; equally, he might sport like a mere animal. In either case, the seemingly civilized Gulliver, like Robinson, offers violence in response. If Robinson Crusoe can be read as an exposé of the vulnerability of esteemed European values when exported to the New World, so Gulliver’s Travels, in this passage at least, lays bare the inhumanity of civil society. An intertextual approach to Part IV in particular, in short, offers a substantial yet immediate preface to larger debates about being human in the eighteenth century and beyond.

Daniel Cook, University of Dundee