Rokeby Lecture 2026 | Gulliver’s Travels Now
Thursday, November 26, 2026 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
The Library will host the 2026 Rokeby Lecture on Thursday 26 November 2026 at 7.30pm at the start of this year’s Armagh’s Georgian Festival.
In this year’s Rokeby Lecture, Brean Hammond, Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature, asks what is the continuing significance of Gulliver’s Travels and indeed of literary satire, now?
Admission is free with donations to the Library most welcome. Booking is essential by e-mailing admin@armaghrobinsonlibrary.co.uk or by telephoning 028 37523142.
Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, better known as Gulliver’s Travels, was published in London by Benjamin Motte on 28 October 1726.
This edition was a bitter disappointment to Swift both for its carelessness and because it contained altered and omitted passages. An early witness to Swift’s unhappiness is the large-paper copy on permanent display in the Long Room in the Armagh Robinson Library that is believed to have been annotated by Swift himself.
In 1735, Dublin publisher George Faulkner brought out a new version as part of a complete edition of Swift’s writings that promised to set the text to rights.
Where, then, is there a more appropriate venue for a lecture on Gulliver’s Travels? But why lecture on it at all? Why, 300 years later, are we still reading it? What might it have to say to the reader who picks it up for the first time in 2026? In this year’s Rokeby Lecture, Brean Hammond asks what is the continuing significance of Gulliver’s Travels and indeed of literary satire, now?
Brean Hammond is Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham. Amongst his most significant book publications are Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670-1740 (Oxford University Clarendon Press, 1997), Double Falsehood (The Arden Shakespeare, 2010), Jonathan Swift (Irish Academic Press, 2010) and Tragicomedy (Methuen, 2021).
He has written many articles on Jonathan Swift including, most recently, contributions to The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels(CUP, 2024) and Jonathan Swift in Context (CUP, 2024). He also writes prose fiction and theatre pieces. His music-theatre play Master Byrd has been widely performed in England and overseas. In 2026 it can be seen at the Stour Festival and at the GuernseyMusic Festival with music provided by the acclaimed ensemble Stile Antico.
