10 Famous Books You've Been Reading Wrong This Whole Time
8. Gulliver's Travels Was Not A Children's Classic
Gulliver's Travels is a lovely adventure tale for children, or at least that's the way it's presented. If you check any bookshop (online or the other kind) you will find numerous retellings of the story as a picture book. In a way this makes sense: the book is a pretty silly tale of a man visiting a number of fictional countries and encountering their weird inhabitants, whether they be foreign, small or horses.
The problem is as time has gone on the book has lost its historical/cultural context. When it was first published in the early 1700s, it was considered a biting satire on nobility, xenophobia, weird science, and petty political feuding.
The tiny Lilliputians, for example, represent regal conflict and the ways in which the average citizen is drawn into the squabbles of nobility. For the Lilliputians the pointless debate was which end to open a boiled egg, a conflict about which the common man doesn't often worry.
It's kind of forgivable that Gulliver's Travels is so widely misread today, as its targets were rooted in a very particular cultural climate which really doesn't exist anymore. Also it was a parody of the (at the time very popular) 'travel diary' genre, though it did very little to stop its success, as you will see at your local bookshop.