Few classics of English literature can have been more read and less understood than Gulliver’s Travels. On its publication three centuries ago, hacks rushed out various ‘keys’ purporting to unlock the book’s secrets, the majority of which are characterised by an uninspiring ratio of hit to miss. The consensus among Jonathan Swift’s contemporaries was that such an aggressive satire must say something actionable somewhere, though it was difficult to see precisely what or where. One early reader expressed his desire that the government should ‘bring the Author, and those concerned with him to exemplary Punishment’ in the pillory, but these hopes were frustrated by the author being ‘so much upon his Guard, that no Forms of Law can touch him’.

In a letter to Alexander Pope, Swift claimed that his aim in the Travels, as in all his writings, was ‘to vex the world rather than divert it’. He succeeded. This discombobulating story of little people and giants, of flying islands and talking horses, has proved notoriously tricky to pin down. One of the complications of reading Swift is that he commits so completely to both sides of his irony; he simultaneously means and doesn’t mean (and, in the words of his greatest modern critic, Claude Rawson, doesn’t not mean) everything he says. The sheer weirdness of the book, its swirling mess of half-constructed parallels and the occasional repulsiveness of its descriptive prose, makes it rather easier to put down than to pick up. In an 1853 lecture, that censorious moralist William Makepeace Thackeray would describe the author of the Travels as ‘a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind – tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene’. One can almost taste the spittle.

It is difficult to imagine how such a book, the central message of which seems to be that humanity is an irredeemable pest that deserves to be eradicated from the face of the earth, could ever have become a children’s classic, even in abridged form. To conceive how it was