The author gives some account of himself and family. His first inducements to travel. He is shipwrecked, and swims for his life. Gets safe on shore in the country of Lilliput; is made a prisoner, and carried up the country.

My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years. My father now and then sending me small sums of money, I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of the mathematics, useful to those who intend to travel, as I always believed it would be, some time or other, my fortune to do. When I left Mr. Bates, I went down to my father: where, by the assistance of him and my uncle John, and some other relations, I got forty pounds, and a promise of thirty pounds a year to maintain me at Leyden: there I studied physic two years and seven months, knowing it would be useful in long voyages. (Chapter 1)

Basic set up:

This is the beginning of Jonathan Swift's novel.

Many of the earliest novels written in English were adventure stories. Gulliver's Travels, which is one of the early examples of the English novel, is no exception. The novel tells of Gulliver's adventures in strange lands—including his stay on the fictional island of Lilliput, where lots of really tiny people walk all over him. Sounds legit.

Gulliver's Travels fed the public's taste for entertainment. During the Augustan age, people read novels the way that we now watch TV shows—you know, for thrills and chills. The fantastic events that take place in this novel pretty much made it a smash hit.

Here you have it, ladies and gents: a great example of how the journalistic style influenced the prose writing of this period.

Gulliver's narration is prefaced with something that reads like it could have come out of the table of content of an adventure magazine: "The author gives some account of himself and family. His first inducements to travel. He is shipwrecked, and swims for his life." It's as if we're reading a report here. Gulliver's story is told in a journalistic style (Gulliver, after all, is supposedly recounting to us the "facts" of his adventures), but the novel is also framed in a journalistic style. There's another voice telling us that hey, what we're reading is truth, not fiction.

But, of course, Swift can't help being satirical. What he's actually doing here is making fun of the genre of "adventure stories" so popular during his time. The events and places are so fantastic in Gulliver's Travels that they can't possibly be real, even though Gulliver narrates them in a matter-of-fact way.