'When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest,' said Dr Johnson of Gulliver's Travels. This might do for a put-down of Swift, whom Johnson disliked, perhaps from a sense of likeness. But big men and little men have old folkloric origins, so the idea in itself was not new: as more than one character says in Mary Norton's Borrower books, 'our ancestors spoke openly about "the little people".' Gulliver's Travels bears an intriguing relation to children's books. It is not 'for nothing that, suitably abbreviated, it has become a classic for children': Leavis's oracular utterance, like Johnson's, was intended as a put-down. And 'suitable abbreviation' has tended to mean the removal of Books Three and Four, which leaves 'big men and little men', usually stripped of the more stinging harshnesses of Books One and Two.

LRB 15 September 1983 | PDF Download