A Letter To Lemuel Gulliver

I wrote this for Letters With Character, a now dormant blog on which real people could write letters to fictional ones.

I decided to write to Lemuel Gulliver, the central character in Jonathan Swift's 1726 work Gulliver’s Travels:

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My dear Lemuel,

I hope this epistle finds you in the best of health and humour for I have unfortunate news. I have striven to the best of my abilities, but try as I might I have been unable to convince my employer to publish your Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of The World in its current form. My superiors believed it not to be an instructional guide as you intended, but instead a flight of fancy.

A series of researches was ordered to seek references from similar works in the hope that they might be able to corroborate your assertions. There are naturally scores of mentions of Japan available to us, and we were successful in finding a single obscure allusion to a flying island which may or may not be the Laputa which you mention.

Despite our best efforts we can find no proof of the existence of the countries of Lilliput, Blefuscu, Brobdingnag, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib or that of the Houyhnhnms.

I am sorry to be required to inform you, that without some form of evidence of these nations, we will be forced to publish this text as a work of fiction instead. I look forward to hearing from you.

Please pass on my best wishes to Mary, the children and your Cousin Sympson.

Yours Sincerely

David Black