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Part 1. A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT
This part is about Gulliver's adventures in Lilliput.
After being shipwrecked, Gulliver gets safely ashore and finds himself in a strange country inhabited by a race of people about six inches high Everything else is on a corresponding scale. By making them so small Swift stresses their insignificance, and makes the reader despise them as petty creatures and feel contempt for their ideas, customs, and institutions. Swift mocks at their Emperor, who boasts that he is the delight of the universe while, as a matter of fact, he is no taller than a nail.
It is easy enough to understand that Swift meant this small country with its shallow interests, corrupt laws and evil customs to symbolize the England of the 18th century; the government ("a great office"), the court with its atmosphere of hostility, hypocrisy and flattery, where the author felt as lonely as his hero when among the Lilliputians, and religious controversy.
Swift compares the courtiers with rope-dancers: those who can jump the highest get the highest office.
Courtiers who want to be awarded with a prize must undergo a special test. "a trial of dexterity", – they have to leap over a stick or creep under it backwards and forwards several times, according as the stick is raised or lowered by the Emperor and the first minister. Swift stresses the fact that it is very difficult for a courtier to please both the king and the minister. Flattery and hypocrisy are the only qualities necessary to work one's way up at the court.
Tramecksan and Slameckean, the two political parties which differed only in the size of their heels, were invented by Swift to ridicule the Whigs and the Tories who were always at loggerheads, though their political aims were almost the same.
In describing the war between Lilliput and Befuiscu which was caused by disagreement concerning the manner of breaking eggs, the author satirizes the religious controversy between Catholics and Protestants, their contradictions being as insignifican as those between the Big-endians and Small endians.