British Society In Gulliver's Travels

884 Words4 Pages
“A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people”. This quote is perfect for this novel because Gulliver’s Travels judges the British society of the particular time period through the heart and soul of the main character Gulliver. Gulliver’s Travels makes many annotations on British society of their particular time period. As Gulliver visits different islands at the time he discovers many different societies and their people. All the societies that Gulliver discovers are used as a comparison to British society of the time period throughout the novel. The comments this reading makes on the British society of the particular time period is that it is violent, greedy, and savage. To Begin, One of the comments made on British society was that the people are violent. This is shown through the conversation between the king of Brobdingnag and Gulliver, when Gulliver informs him about Britain’s history of war and offers him gunpowder as a polite gesture. Gulliver giving the king gunpowder, a weapon of war, as a polite gesture proves he is accustomed to the British way of violence and fighting. I understood the manner of compounding them, and could direct his workmen how to make those tubes of a size proportional to all other things in his majesty’s kingdom, and the largest need not be above two hundred foot long: twenty or thirty of which tubes, charged with the proper quantity of powder and balls, would batter down the walls of the strongest town in his