SOURCE: Pencak, William. “Swift Justice: Gulliver's Travels as a Critique of Legal Institutions.” In Law and Literature Perspectives, edited by Bruce L. Rockwood, pp. 255-67. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

In the following essay, Pencak comments on Swift's Gulliver's Travels as a critique of English legal injustices but emphasizes that neither anger nor utopian thinking prove useful for Gulliver, but only working within the realities of the present system.

Gulliver's Travels ends with a paradox. Gulliver wrote the book for the Publick Good, the only words so capitalized in the entire text, “for who can read the virtues I have mentioned in the glorious Houyhnhnms, without being ashamed of his own Vices, when he considers himself as the reasoning, governing Animal of his Country” (256).¹ Yet the man who would have his countrymen imitate these exemplars can stand neither the sight nor the stench of his loving family, can barely...