Lecture | Jonathan Swift: Gulliver Amongst Friends

The Library will host the lecture Gulliver Amongst Friends, given by Hester Grant, on Wednesday 21 October 2026 at 7.30pm.

The lecture will be one of the many to be given this autumn to highlight the 300th anniversary of the publication of Jonathan Swift’s work Gulliver’s Travels.

Admission is free with advanced booking required via e-mail admin@armaghrobinsonlibrary.co.uk or phone 028 37523142.

In March 1726 Jonathan Swift travelled from Dublin to London with the manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels in his baggage. He spent the summer with his close friends Alexander Pope and John Gay, at Pope’s villa on the Thames at Twickenham, wandering through Pope’s beautiful garden and grotto, boating downriver to visit newly built Marble Hill, and plotting the clandestine publication of Gulliver’s Travels.

Hester said about her lecture,

I will explain how the intensity of the reunion of the three writers, and stimulation provided by the long-absent Swift, marked a turning point in the careers of Pope and Gay, while Gulliver’s Travels received its final amendments. Threaded through this narrative is an account of the writing of Swift’s masterpiece, and the story of its secret publication (necessary on account of its explosive satire) that involved dropping the manuscript at a publisher’s ‘in the dark from a Hackney-coach’.

Copies of Hester’s publication The Twitnam Summer will be available to buy following the lecture at £25.00.

Keeper of Armagh Robinson Library, the Very Revd Shane Forster, on Hester’s lecture,

The first edition of Gulliver’s Travels, with Jonathan Swift’s hand-written annotated notes, is definitely one of the most famous items in our collection at Armagh Robinson Library. In this significant year for the book, we are delighted that Hester Grant will be delivering this lecture for us, opening the door to the relationships, context and events around the eighteenth-century publication of this very significant piece of literature.

Hester Grant is a writer specialising in the eighteenth century. Her first book The Good Sharps, a biography of a remarkable eighteenth-century family, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2020. Hester’s second book, The Twitnam Summer, published by Harper Collins, was launched earlier this year to coincide with Gulliver’s Travels special anniversary.