Lecture | Swift and the Vexed Publication of Gulliver’s Travels, 1726-1735

The lecture Swift and the Vexed Publication of Gulliver’s Travels, 1726-1735, will be given on Wednesday 28 October 2026, by Professor Ian Campbell Ross, Professor Emeritus Trinity College Dublin. The lecture is part of the series to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the first publication of Gulliver’s Travels.

Booking

Admission is free, but booking is essential by e-mailing: admin@armaghrobinsonlibrary.co.uk .

Supported by Queen’s University Belfast.

Ian Campbell Ross, Emeritus Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies and Fellow Emeritus in Trinity College Dublin, has published widely on writers including Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, Elizabeth Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith and Jonathan Swift. With Stephanie Breen and Aileen Douglas, he has co-curated the ‘Gulliver at 300’ exhibition in the Long Room, The Library, Trinity College Dublin, which will run until 31 December 2026.

Speaking ahead of his lecture in Armagh, Ian said,

Gulliver’s Travels is among the most famous, widely-read books in world literature and one that has certainly succeeded, as Swift intended, in vexing many of its readers over three centuries. The work now exists in thousands of versions, from scholarly editions to popular printings, abridgements, illustrated editions and translations into many languages, to children’s books, comics and film adaptations. The Gulliver’s Travels familiar to today’s readers accordingly varies greatly. It is an irony that the first reader of the Travels to be vexed by the book was none other than Swift himself. This lecture will look at the author’s labyrinthine stratagems to avoid being identified as the author of his dangerously satirical work on first publication in 1726, and his subsequent efforts over the next decade to see his book in print in a version he could approve.

Ian added the quotation from Jonathan Swift to Alexander Pope written on 29 September 2025, ‘the chief end I propose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it.’

Carol Conlin, Assistant Keeper of Armagh Robinson Library said,

The lecture series is being organised in association with the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. We are most grateful for this support and wish to thank in particular Professor Moyra Haslett, the Coordinator for the Library’s Memorandum of Understanding with Queen’s University Belfast. We also look forward to the second lecture in the series, which will be given by Professor Haslett on Thursday 12 November 2026.