The Media Beat with David Tereshchuk
Oct 23, 2026 · 14 min · 8 segments
Next week is the 300th anniversary of a literary treasure, *Gulliver’s Travels*. THE MEDIA BEAT’s public radio podcast celebrates the book's skewering of “greatness" among people and nations…
Its author, Jonathan Swift, like so many magnificent writers of so-called English literature, was in fact Irish, born and bred in Dublin's fair city.
The book, though, was published in London and instantly proved to be an explosive political satire.
Perhaps wisely, it was published under the eponymous pseudonym of Lemuel Gulliver, Swift's fictional surgeon and also sea captain, who serves in the book as both narrator and protagonist.
New editions were run off within three weeks, and again in December that year, 1726.
John Gay, Swift's English contemporary and himself no slouch in the satire business, as author of The Beggar's Opera, for instance, wrote soon after Gulliver's publication, quote, "...from the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery." Another close friend, the poet Alexander Pope, already famous for, among other things, his long satirical verse, The Rape of the Lock, was even more energetic as a publicist for Swift.
Its author, Jonathan Swift, like so many magnificent writers of so-called English literature, was in fact Irish, born and bred in Dublin's fair city.
The book, though, was published in London and instantly proved to be an explosive political satire.
Perhaps wisely, it was published under the eponymous pseudonym of Lemuel Gulliver, Swift's fictional surgeon and also sea captain, who serves in the book as both narrator and protagonist.
New editions were run off within three weeks, and again in December that year, 1726.
John Gay, Swift's English contemporary and himself no slouch in the satire business, as author of The Beggar's Opera, for instance, wrote soon after Gulliver's publication, quote, "...from the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery." Another close friend, the poet Alexander Pope, already famous for, among other things, his long satirical verse, The Rape of the Lock, was even more energetic as a publicist for Swift.
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