42. Travels " Into Several " Remote Nations " Of The " World. " In Four Parts. " By Lemuel Gulliver, " Fir?t a Surgeon, and then a Cap- " tain of ?everal Ships. " Vol. I. " London: " Printed for Benj. Motte, at the " Middle Temple-Gate in Fleet-?treet. " MDCCXXVI.

"I have employed my time, (beside ditching) in finishing, correcting, amending, and transcribing my travels in four parts complete, newly augmented and intended for the press, when the world shall deserve them, or rather when a printer shall be found brave enough to venture his ears." This is what Swift says in a letter written to Pope, and thus it will be seen that there could have been no real doubt among Swift's friends as to the authorship of the book, though for very obvious reasons it was found desirable to have it published anonymously. Even after it was issued, and had proved a success, the pretense of ignorance of the author's identity was kept up. Pope himself writes, November 16, 1726 (the work appeared October 28):

"I congratulate you first on what you call your cousin's wonderful book, which is publica trita manu at present, and I prophesy will hereafter be the admiration of all men...." "Motte," (the publisher who had been brave enough to risk his ears), "received the copy, he tells me, he knew not from whence, nor from whom, dropped at his house in the dark, from a hackney coach. By computating the time I found it was after you left England, so for my part, I suspend my judgement."

Swift was staying with Pope when the manuscript was so mysteriously left at Motte's door by Charles Ford, his intermediary, through whom, and Erasmus Lewis, all the business was conducted. Writing under the assumed name of Sympson, Swift demanded that Motte should give him £200, which the publisher agreed to do after six months if the success of the book would allow. The whole issue was exhausted within a week after its appearance, and a second edition speedily followed, making the payment, which we learn was promptly effected, an easy matter. We are told that Swift used to leave the profits of his writing to the booksellers; but Gulliver proved the exception to the rule. He says, in 1735, "I never got a farthing by anything I writ, except one about eight years ago, and that was by Mr. Pope's prudent arrangement for me." Motte, like Taylor with Robinson Crusoe, grew rich out of it; or, as Swift puts it to Knightley Chetwood in a letter dated February 14, 1726-7, in which he still keeps up the mystery of the authorship, "... in Engl^d I hear it hath made a bookseller almost rich enough to be an alderman."

Of its success, Arbuthnot says, November 8, 1726: "Gulliver's Travels, I believe, will have as great a run as John Bunyan. It is in everybody's hands...." Gay wrote a few days later: "The whole impression sold in a week. From the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery." "Here is a book come out," says Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "that all our people of taste run mad about...."

It speaks well for Motte's sagacity that he should have been willing to undertake the publishing of so violent a book at all, and we are little surprised that he balked at certain passages, and that, to avoid offense, "he got those alterations and insertions made" which Swift afterward so bitterly resented. In the letter to Knightley Chetwood quoted above, Swift said: "In my Judgment I should think it hath been mangled in the press, for in some parts it doth not seem of a piece, but I shall hear more when I am in England." In a letter to Ford written more than six years later, we find him still recurring to the matter:

"Now you may please to remember how much I complained of Motte's suffering some friend of his (I suppose it was Mr. Tooke, a clergyman, now dead) not onely to blot out some things that he thought might give offence, but to insert a good deal contrary to the author's manner and style and intention. I think you had a Gulliver interleaved and set right in those mangled and murdered pages ... To say the truth I cannot with patience endure that mingled and mangled manner as it came from Motte's hands, and it will be extremely difficult for me to correct it by other means, with so ill a memory and so bad a state of health." Swift had good reason to complain about this matter as he did, personally and through Ford, who wrote to Motte blaming him for the printer's gross errors. "Besides the whole sting is absent out of several passages in order to soften them. Thus the style is debased, the humours quite lost, and the matter insipid," cries the enraged author. The interleaved copy was forthcoming, and the text as corrected was printed in Dublin in 1735.

The bibliography of the book is perplexing. There seem to have been four distinct issues, or, rather, editions, during the first year; while copies of the same edition show many variations. The edition to which the large paper copies belong is usually called the first. In it the four parts are paged separately, and the portrait of Gulliver, signed "Sturt et. Sheppard. Sc.," is found in two states. One of these states, evidently the first, has the inscription, "Captain Lemuel Gulliver, of Redriff Ætat. ?uÆ 58.," in two lines below the oval. The other has the inscription around the oval, as follows: "Captain Lemuel Gulliver Of Redriff Ætat. SuÆ LVIII.," and beneath, where the name was before, a quotation from Persius now appears.

The three other editions have distinct differences of type, setting and ornaments. The portrait in all of these is of the second state. Two of these editions have the parts paged separately, but one has a continuous pagination for each volume. One edition was reissued in 1727, with verses by Pope prefixed. On the title-page of the first volume it is called "second edition," and on that of the second volume, "second edition corrected." This edition was probably considered by the publisher to be the most correct, and was therefore, probably, the last issued in 1726.

Octavo.

Collation: Two volumes. Volume I: 1 l., xvi, 148 pp.; 3 ll., 164 pp. Volume II: 3 ll., 155 pp.; 4 ll., 199 pp. Portrait, four maps.