Gulliver's Travels].

lifetime edition of Gulliver's Travels

The designated second edition, fourth overall, of Johnathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Swift (1667-1745) had completed the draft for his satire by August 1725, however publication of this potentially politically explosive work was delayed until October the following year, when with the help of his friends Alexander Pope, and John Gay and Erasmus Lewis, it as brought through the press of Benjamin Motte.

Gulliver's Travels would go on to become Swift's most acclaimed work, and the book by which he is chiefly remembered today. 'Its allegorical mode of satire constantly modulates between specific allusions and general types, reflecting characters and events traceable to prototypes in Stuart and Georgian court politics (in Lilliput and Brobdingnag), and to people and events in Swift's own personal life (the king of Brobdingnag as Temple, for example, or the Flying Island as an allegory of English imperialism in Ireland). It also includes moments of farcical low comedy in the Academy of Lagado (part 3) and elsewhere. It is in part 4 (the voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms) that Swift reaches the supremely vexing point of his whole writing career, mixing comedy with the tragi-comic psychological collapse of Gulliver, the representative Englishman who turns his back on the whole human race because it has failed to live up to the ideal of reason' (ODNB).

'This is the first Motte edition (after the A, AA, B editions, and 12mo printing) to contain emendations in the spirit of Ford's Errata; hence 'The Second Edition', and 'The Second Edition, Corrected' on the title-pages' (Teerink).

Second edition; 2 vols, 8vo (20 x 13 cm); portrait frontispiece to vol. I (2nd state, 1st issue), 4 engraved maps, 2 engraved plans, woodcut head and tailpieces, bookplate to front pastedown of each vol., vol. II lacking preliminary advertisement leaf, first few gatherings (pp 1-23) of vol. II with dampstaining, textblock toned with spotting across both vols; 19th-century speckled calf gilt, double gilt filet borders, gilt spines in 6 compartments, contrast red morocco lettering-piece to second compartments, black morocco volume labels to fourth, a little rubbed, very good; [28], v-xii, 148, [6], 164; [6], 155, [9], 199, [1]pp.

ESTC T139025; Teerink/Scouten 293.