And so it has been ever since. The great Whig critics, such as Jeffrey and Macaulay, were repelled by Swift's love of the morbid, the bawdy and the grotesque and by a cultural pessimism they saw as reactionary. Later critics were similarly harsh, with the partial exception of George Orwell. In his essay of 1946, Orwell denounces "a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity", yet also declares: "If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them." He treats Swift primarily as a polemicist, and his satire as merely a tool of his political ideology ("Tory anarchism"), but this is surely the wrong way round. Swift, like Orwell, changed his mind about politics; this did not diminish the quality of their writing. Indeed, the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four would be inconceivable without Gulliver's Travels.

Why has Gulliver's Travels such a universal appeal? The supposed author is a ship's surgeon, not a savant writing for the savvy. Along with the usual apparatus, Womersley's edition includes "long notes" which are really short essays on aspects of the book. One of these quotes his publisher, George Faulkner, on Swift's practice of having read aloud his works with two servants present, "which, if they did not comprehend, he would alter and amend until they understood it perfectly well, and then would say, This will do; for I write to the Vulgar, more than to the Learned." How many other writers take such pains to make themselves clear?

A charge made against Gulliver is that it is a clever persiflage of Queen Anne's day, but limited to its own time and place. Swift replied to one such critic, his French translator the Abbé Desfontaines, that "an author who writes for only one town, one province, one kingdom, or one age is completely despicable. But those who admire Mr Gulliver say, on the contrary, that his writings will last as long as our language, because they are not based on certain fashions and ways of speaking and thinking, but on faults and follies which are fixed in human nature." The Dean spoke more truly than the Abbé.