Abstract

When, in Book II, Chapter VII, the King of Brobdingnag says to Gulliver “As for yourself […] who have spent the greatest part of your life travelling; I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country” (Book II, Ch. VII: 121), he raises an important question—that of the value of travel as a means to correct the individual. The primary original contribution of this dissertation is to take Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) seriously as a work of political theory, specifically on the question of the value of travel as a means of individual edification. This dissertation extracts from the text a political argument concerning the pitfalls of the assumption that travel is of benefit to individuals in all circumstances. In doing so, it places Swift in dialogue with Locke, Shaftesbury, the proponents of the Baconian scientific project, and Montaigne, as well as extracting an overarching criticism of liberal and enlightenment values through the critique of travel. Through a close reading of Gulliver’s Travels, alongside key political and religious contextual analysis, the dissertation assesses the text’s treatment of the relationship between travel, education, science, and politics. This dissertation extracts from Swift’s text an argument that travel can only be edifying if pursued in a disciplined manner as part of an organic hierarchical society, opening up a wider criticism of Modernist and Enlightenment ideas of education.