1

SATIRE IN SWIFTS GULLIVERS TRAVEL AND IN GAYS THE BEGGARS OPERA

Satire is one of the techniques that the writers use to convey their point of view and usually they
use this feature when they want to criticize some aspects of the society they live in, such as a new
philosophy, a new political or religious ideology and men's vices. This feature uses humour to
convey the critic. Satire was really popular during the Enlightenment because the writer had an
important role in society , he had the role of denouncing the injustices of society so that people
could correct them. During the Eighteenth century there were many important satirist figures such
as Pope, Fielding, Sterne, Swift, Gay and many others. In this essay I want to focus on the ways
and the extents in which Swift and Gay used satire in very important works such as Swift's
Gulliver's travels and Gay's The beggar's opera. Both Swift and Gay lived during the same period
and they saw the birth of a new kind of society that perhaps can be named as Commercial society,
and they also experienced all the political changes after the Glorious Revolution and the starting of
the Industrial Revolution. In fact, for what concerns politics after the Glorious Revolution there
were important reforms such as The Bill of Rights (1689) and The Act of Settlement (1701). For
what concerns economics it is possible to say that trades and banks became really relevant in the
United Kingdom and also the first factories started appearing, preceding the Industrial Revolution.
All of this brought also some changes in society because many people thanks to their success in
trades and commerce became rich and powerful so that they started influencing also the political
life . In fact the parliament was divided into two parts : the Tories and the Whigs .The Tories were
conservatives while the Whigs were reformists and agreed with the new economy that was
appearing. Gay and Swift agreed both with the conservative part of the Parliament. They did not
like the society that was developing and the fact that everybody starting from that period could take
part in politics . So they both used their works to criticize, in different ways, the aspects that they
did not like. For example both Gay and Swift were members of the Scriblerus club which was a
2

group of cultivated people such as Pope and Henry St. John who were Tory oriented . This group of
people wanted to criticize with their works the pretentious erudition through the invention of a
character called Martinus Scriblerus . The Scriblerus club had an important influence both on The
beggars opera and Gullivers travels, in fact John Gay had the inspiration for The beggars opera
thanks to a letter that Swift wrote to him and vice versa it seems that Swift decides to write
Gullivers travels thanks to Gays suggestion as it can be seen from a letter Gay to Swift on
political satire ( between 1720 and 1735) .
The beggars opera was the most famous of Gays works. It belonged to the genre of the ballad
opera which was a new genre created during the eighteenth century in opposition to the Italian
opera , it had few prevalent aspects such as the fact that the language was very informal and vulgar
in certain situations, the music which was made up by very short songs and the characters that were
usually taken from the lower class. This kind of work wanted to make fun of the people watching
Italian operas because this was a fashion in the eighteenth century and everybody loved Italian
opera and considered themselves as a passionate of the genre coming from Italy. The Italian opera
had opposite characteristics compared to the ballad opera ,in fact it used long songs, very formal
language and characters taken from the upper class, such as kings and princes ,or sometimes from
the myth. So it is possible to say that The beggars opera as a genre conveyed satire because it had
the aim of criticizing the fashion of that time about the Italian opera and it managed to do it by
creating a new genre which was a parody of the Italian one because it used the same features but
inverting them. Anyway in within The beggars opera itself there were other elements that had been
used to criticize this fashion such as the fact that Gay chose popular music and thieves and
prostitutes and the beggar himself as the main characters of his works. The title of The beggars
opera itself was a contradiction because usually there were no beggars in the opera and the style in
which a beggar spoke was not appropriate for opera. Another satirical element was the argument
between Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit which was inspired to Gay by the rivalry between two
prima donnas of the Italian opera, called Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni , who once
3

argued on stage arriving to the point of pulling out each others hair. Despite this , Underneath this
satire on the Italian opera there was a strong satire on the social and political situation of that time ,
above all there was a strong critic of Sir Walpoles government, in fact there seemed to be a
similarity between the character of Peachum and Sir Walpole and so the corrupted Peachum was
considered to represent Sir Walpole in the ballad opera. In any case The beggars opera showed all
the political corruption , the importance given to money and the criminality developing in that
time. The result to all of this was chaos. The public felt a sense of disorientation within all of this ,
they felt like order and rules did not exist anymore and that was exactly where Gays critic of
society layed. Gay with this work kind of wanted to show what could happen if the world continued
changing towards capitalism and modernity but at the same time he did not judge his characters and
he described them as complex characters with good aspects and bad ones. According to him , who
was a conservative , if the society changed towards those ideals, it would become a chaos and with
his work he tried to show it putting thing to an extreme and exaggerated point so that the technique
of satire could work. In fact on the one hand for the satire on the Italian opera Gay used a
manipulation of the genre and skewing language and defying expectations of forms he conveyd his
satire and together with it also his critic. On the other hand Gay used different features to satirize on
the society, in fact he used exaggeration and contradictions . In a work called Similitude as a satire
in The beggars opera and written by William Bowham Piper, it was said that the similitude was
used to satirize and it was explained that similitude was a figure of speech that used a
correspondence of similarities and contraries and by using this technique it was possible for Gay to
create satire.
In Gullivers travels whereas the satirical element was different because it was true that Swift too
used the parody of a literary genre , which in this case was traveller tales , but he did it in an
original way because he used the characteristic features of that genre to convey satire and in Swift
and the common reader there was an interesting analysis on the ways in which Swift satirized and
4

also on the effect that it produced on the reader. In fact, it said that ' The more one relies on the
conventional attitude of reverence for the classics and for the moral values of poetry, the more one
is lively to be made fun of it.'This statement meant that the story itself, which was told in the book
and the style in which it was told , was shocking because it did not respect any of the common rules
of classics and any of the common values that society could share. So it could be possible to say
that Swift used a lot of originality and he conveyed satire by introducing strange and surprising
situations, that for the reader were completely new, and by using this method he pushed the reader
to think about it critically. All of this was made using the typical features of the traveller tales, so an
impersonal style and very detailed descriptions because 'A travellers chief Aim should be to make
Men wiser and better, and to improve their Minds by the bad, as well as the good Examples of what
they deliver concerning foreign Places.' This was written in the prefatory letter of the 1735 edition
of Gullivers travels as I read in Swifts Narrative satires . These characteristics were pushed to the
edge and this created satire. The effects that this kind of satire produced were quite aggressive
because the reader was disoriented because he could not apply to the strange things told in the book
any of the set of values and rules that he know . As F.B. Leavis showed in The irony of Swift that
'Swifts irony is essentially a means of surprise and negation , its function is to defeat habits , to
intimidate, to demoralize.' In Swift and the satirists art, written by Edward W. Rosenheim Jr. There
was a very interesting explanation of the different ways in which it was possible to create Satire .
There were two techniques, 'Distortion' and ' Fabrication' , and it said that 'We may call
distortion, for example, any kind of description, assertion or argument in which an authentic state
of affairs or a sincerely held conviction undergoes palpable alteration. 'Whereas for 'Fabrication' it
said that 'The satirist has not merely manipulated the truth but has engaged in novel creation, and
the readers task is not only to restore a distorted truth to its proper proportions but to find
5

correspondences and draw inferences.'According to this explanation Gullivers travels could be
considered to use 'Fabrication', because it created a completely new reality and the reader had to
infer to understand the satire that laid behind the fiction. Another quotation about the fact that Swift
created satire using imaginative worlds, was in Swifts narrative satires by Zimmerman saying that '
Its satiric images and scenes are placed outside familiar lands, thus rationalizing their lack of
verisimilitude. 'Because of this ' lack of verisimilitude ' it was not possible to say whether the critics
that laid behind the satire were addressed directly to someone or were just general thoughts. Swift
in his work criticized the New science that was developing during his times, it also criticized the
political system , the religious differences and the western culture as a whole. Even though in the
book there was no trace of any direct critic to any people in particular someone believed for
example that most of the political satire that was in the book, was addressed to Sir Walpole. F.P.
Lock in his The politics of 'Gullivers travels' demonstrated that Gullivers travels s critics were not
addressed to anyone in particular in fact he said that 'His satire is universal, not particular and it
weaken its force to suggest he was giving up to party what he meant for mankind.'The reason why
Swift criticized society, politics, religion and science was that he was really pessimistic about his
age and he had no hope for improvements , in fact in The politics of 'Gullivers travels' it said that
'He was convinced that his own epoch was one of decline, the English golden age being the period
preceding the seventeenth century civil war'. As Gay he was a conservative too, so it was difficult
for him to trust all the changes that were about to happen and accept them. Another important
element in this analysis of Gullivers travels was the fact that it could be very difficult and very
dangerous to try to categorize this work, because it had characteristics of the traveller tales, but
also of the diaries, also it could be considered an imaginative tale. It could b read by the youths in
this way and by the adults as a satire , as Rosenheim told in his Swift and the satirists art ' The
6

proposition that an apparently charming story, while undeniably appealing as such to the youthful
or unsophisticated reader, is actually a bitter satiric attack upon authentic follies and abuses.'
In conclusion , Gullivers travels was similar to The beggars opera in some elements but it
differed a lot on others. In fact the two works were similar in the sense that both used a parody of
other literary genre : Gullivers travels was a parody of the traveller tales , while The beggars
opera was a parody of the Italian opera. Another common aspect was the fact that both these two
works were either entertaining or critical, in fact Gullivers travels could be considered also a tale
for children because it was about the fantastic adventures of Gulliver in unknown worlds but at the
same time it also hided a strong critic of society, whereas as The beggars opera was basically a
show it obviously had the role of entertaining but at the same time it also made people think about
their society in a critical way. Both Gay and Swift were conservative and criticized the same aspects
of politics and society, such as Walpoles government , even if it was not possible to say whether
Gullivers travels political satire was directly addressed to him. The most important differences
were instead the fact that Gay used a more direct satire while Swift not, and that the techniques
they used to satirize were different. In fact, according to the distinction between 'Distortion' and
'Fabrication' that was made previously, it could be possible to say that Gay in his The beggars
opera applied the 'Distortion' technique because he just modified the reality that the reader already
knew in the eighteenth century making it exaggerated and using the oppositions between
similarities and contraries of similitude as said before, whereas Swift in Gullivers travels used
'Fabrication'.



7


WORK CITED
Gay, John. Gay to Swift on political satire. Huntington Library Quarterly. (1977) : Vol. 41, Issue 1,
27-35. http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-services/library-museum-gallery-old .
Johnston , Oswald. Swift and the common reader.1962. http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-
departments/information-services/library-museum-gallery-old.
Leavis, F.B. The irony of Swift. Scrutiny, 1934. http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-
departments/information-services/library-museum-gallery-old.
Lock , F.P. The politics of ' Gullivers travels'. Oxford University Press, 1980.
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-services/library-museum-gallery-old.
Piper, Bowham, William. Similitude as a satire in' The beggars opera'. Eighteenth Century
Studies. (1988) : Vol.21, Page 334-351. http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-
services/library-museum-gallery-old.
Rosenheim Jr, Edward W. Swift and the satirists art. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press.
(1967) : Page 21-22,90.
http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/beggars_opera/ .
Zimmerman, Everett. Swifts narrative satires. London : Cornell University Press. (1983): Page
113, 123.