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Title
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[Gulliver imagines himself as an immortal seeing the rise and fall of empires]
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Description
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This image comes when Gulliver imagines himself as one of the immortals from Luggnag. Gulliver imagines witnessing the changes in the world such as the rise and decline of empires, seeing ancient cities, the first European contact with the other continents, and the development of medicine, among others. In this image we see Gulliver as an old man looking over the ruins of Pompeii while Mount Vesuvius smokes in the background. The tops of Roman buildings are visible sticking out of the ash and stone that covered the city. Gulliver rests his foot on the skull of one of the victims. He stands next to destroyed capitals of pillars and marble carvings. When Swift wrote the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels in 1727, excavations at Pompeii had not yet begun, however by the time of this edition in 1839, the excavations at both Pompeii and Herculaneum were well underway, and there was a growing public fascination with the ancient Roman cities. This contemporary fascination is likely why this site was chosen to illustrate Gulliver’s imaginings of witnessing major historical events, as many of the readers of the novel in the 1830s would be able to identify the site, even though Pompeii was likely not was Swift was imagining when he wrote this passage. The same image appears in the 1843 Krabbe edition.
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Image Creator
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Grandville (Illustrator)
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Identifier
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mta:21128
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Source Name
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Gulliver's Reisen in unbekannte Länder
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Image
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mta_21128_OBJ.png
mta_21128_OBJ.png