Husbandry, Pedagogy, and Improvement in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

We live in an island almost infamous for bogs, and yet, I do not remember that any one has attempted much concerning them…tho’ I am satisfy’d, that what I shall be able to say, will be very little, in respect of what would be required, on such an important subject, and so very necessary to the improvement of the kingdom.—William King, “Of the Bogs and Loughs of Ireland”¹

Improvement and Cultivation

In Part II of Gulliver’s Travels, when Gulliver is engaged in dialogue with the Brobdingnagian King about the nature of politics, the King shares his maxim that “whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”² Similarly, during his questions and answers with Gulliver about the nature of English society, the King demands to know “what methods were used to cultivate the minds and bodies of our young nobility, and in what kind of business they commonly spent the first and teachable parts of their lives?” (182). Unlike virtually every other ruler depicted in Gulliver, the Brobdingnagian King demonstrates political competence and authority by attending to the health, prosperity, and growth of both his kingdom’s lands and the “minds and bodies of [the] young nobility.” The King is nothing less than a cultivator-in-chief, the one who uses his power to “improve, promote, or meliorate” whatever is “capable of improvement,” to adapt Johnson’s definition.³

Critics of Gulliver’s Travels have separately noted several instances of attempted improvement in the course of Gulliver’s voyages: in the agriculture and architecture of Brobdingnag or Balnibarbi, in the permanently senescent and cognitively arrested Struldbrugs, and in the subjugation and exploitation of the Yahoos in Houyhnhnm Land.⁴ Each of these examples shows what happens when an individual or group begins to desire some form of improvement in their condition, whether those aspirations belong to the Brobdingnagian King, Lord Munodi, the Projectors of Lagado, or Gulliver himself aspiring to Houyhnhnm-hood. These scattered examples in Gulliver converge around two important ideological preoccupations of eighteenth-century Anglo-British culture: the cultivation of landed property and of the self.

It is the Brobdingnagian King’s attention towards both forms of cultivation that allows him successfully to rule a kingdom as large and complex as Brobdingnag. In governing, even indirectly, the material, demographic, and intellectual growth of his kingdom, the King uses his knowledge not for the direct exercise of power but in the service of hegemony, which is capable of acting across great distances of time and space. The Brobdingnagian King offers a vision of both “improvement” and governance in the service of hegemonic power.

In this respect, the Brobdingnagian King rules in perfect accord with both of the prescriptive “fantasies” of eighteenth-century Anglo-British culture that Jenny Davidson has outlined in Breeding. As she observes,

the fantasy of improvement—improvement of children in the form of education, improvement of landscapes by a whole host of techniques of cultivation—was very widely held in eighteenth-century Britain, to the point that the period’s orientation toward culture and cultivation is taken to be one of its most striking and distinctive of features.⁵

Thus, from one perspective, Gulliver’s Travels’ repeated treatment of failed improvement—whether we are discussing the doomed projects of Lord Munodi, the bizarre experiments of the Academy, the infinitely aging but unlearning Struldbrugs, the filthy and unteachable Yahoos—reflects Swift’s pessimistic view about the possibilities of rational, planned improvement, and a humbling of his age’s or his nation’s characteristic fantasies about the tractability of the human race or its environment. And in this way, Swift’s satire can pretty easily be accommodated within a particular inversion of Enlightenment or Whiggish optimism, which leads, I would argue, towards still-popular critical formulations like the “gloom of the Tory satirists.” This places Gulliver within a tacitly English...