Rewind book: Gulliver's Travels
"In a little time I felt something alive moving on my left leg … I perceived it to be a human creature not six inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hands, and a quiver at his back."
by Jonathan Swift
Benjamin Motte
"In a little time I felt something alive moving on my left leg … I perceived it to be a human creature not six inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hands, and a quiver at his back."
So says Lemuel Gulliver after he washes up in Lilliput, whose miniscule inhabitants turn him into a de facto "colossus". This poses considerable challenges for the well-organised, pedantic Lilliputians.
The government worries, for example, that feeding Gulliver might cause a famine. But the "great man-mountain" eventually wins the respect of the bureaucratic Lilliputians, who hire 300 cooks and the same number of tailors to make his clothes.
The entente does not last. The Lilliputians (whose size embodies their myopic view of humanity beyond their boundaries) order Gulliver to help Lilliput as a builder, land surveyor and eventually as a weapon against their enemies on Blefuscu. Gulliver's habitual good cheer is tinged with anxiety as he begins to realise that some of the articles of his acceptance were not "so honourable as I could have wished".
Gulliver may be a giant in Lilliput, but he is an ant in Brobdingnag - itself a nation of Goliaths. The corn stands at 12 metres tall, steps are 1.8 metres high, and the first man Gulliver sees "appeared as tall as an ordinary spire steeple and took about ten yards at every stride".