In this first chapter, Swift establishes Gulliver’s character. He does this primarily by the vast amount of details that he tells us about Gulliver. Clearly, Gulliver is of good and solid—but unimaginative—English stock. Gulliver was born in Nottinghamshire, a sedate county without eccentricity. He attended Emmanuel College, a respected, but not dazzling, college. The neighborhoods that Gulliver lived in—Old Jury, Fetter Lane, and Wapping—are all lower-middle-class sections. He is, in short, Mr. British middle class of his time.
Gulliver is also, as might be expected, “gullible.” He believes what he is told. He is an honest man, and he expects others to be honest. This expectation makes for humor—and also for irony. We can be sure that what Gulliver tells us will be accurate. And we can also be fairly sure that Gulliver does not always understand the meaning of what he sees. The result is a series of astonishingly detailed, dead-pan scenes. For example, Gulliver gradually discovers, moving from one exact detail to another, that he is a prisoner of men six inches tall.
Concerning the political application of this chapter, note that Gulliver is confined in a building that was emptied because a notorious murder was committed there. The building probably represents Westminster Hall, where Charles I was tried and sentenced to death.
