Gulliver's Travels
First published in 1726 as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, Jonathan Swift's most famous book presents itself as the plain memoir of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon with a gift for being shipwrecked somewhere impossible.
Four voyages carry him to Lilliput, where a court of six-inch people wages war over which end of an egg to crack; to Brobdingnag, where he becomes a giant queen's curiosity and finds English politics looking very small indeed; to the floating island of Laputa and the ruined academies below it; and at last to the country of the Houyhnhnms, rational horses whose decency leaves him unable to bear the company of his own species.
Swift wrote it as a parody of the popular travel narrative, and the joke holds: the deadpan reporting of marvels is exactly what makes the satire land. Beneath the adventure is a steady interrogation of pride, faction, empire and the reasoning animal's high opinion of itself.
Lord High Treasurer of Lilliput and its finest rope-dancer. He resents the cost of maintaining the Man-Mountain and turns the court against Gulliver.
The young daughter of the Brobdingnagian farmer who takes charge of Gulliver, sews his clothes and carries him about in a travelling box. She names him and cares for him throughout the second voyage.
Principal Secretary for Private Affairs in Lilliput, who explains the kingdom's factional quarrels to Gulliver and speaks for leniency when the court turns on him.
The Portuguese sea captain of the fourth voyage, whose patient generosity toward a Gulliver who wants nothing to do with humankind quietly rebuts his misanthropy.