The Peculiar Customs of Lilliput
The people of Lilliput are strangely small, but their ideas are bizarre in a big way.
1726
The people of Lilliput are strangely small, but their ideas are bizarre in a big way.
1726
Lemuel Gulliver has been carried on a strange journey to unknown peoples and cultures, which has now brought him to Lilliput, where the people are barely six inches high.
I SHALL say but little at present of their learning, which, for many ages, has flourished in all its branches among them: but their manner of writing is very peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans, nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians, nor from up to down, like the Chinese, but aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other, like ladies in England.
They bury their dead with their heads directly downward, because they hold an opinion, that in eleven thousand moons* they are all to rise again; in which period the earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found ready standing on their feet.
That is, after 11,000 lunar months, or approximately 889 years.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.