The book appeared on October 28, 1726, in London under a made-up name, as the memoir of a ship's surgeon named Lemuel Gulliver. Swift, the dean of St Patrick's in Dublin, hid behind the fiction and let the worlds of tiny and giant people carry his barbs. The public bought it fast.
The satire cut deep. Through the little Lilliputians and the huge Brobdingnagians, Swift mocked the pettiness of court fights, the vanity of scholars, and the cruelty of rulers, and he saved his sharpest lines for the Yahoo, a brute that stood for man without reason in a world he thought lost. The age saw itself. Readers laughed and winced at once.
The roots were bitter. Swift had failed in England and soured on the great, and he wrote the book as a cure for the pride he thought ruined the world, not as a tale for the nursery. The joke outran him, and children took the voyages while adults read the sting. The split remains. Scholars still read the fourth voyage as a dark joke on mankind.
Gulliver's Travels outlived its moment and its author. It shaped the English novel and gave the language words like "Lilliputian" for the small and grand. Swift died in 1745, blind and bitter. The book still bites. Its giants and small folk name the world we live in.