ABSTRACT
Motte may have been in a hurry to publish Gulliver’s Travels, but the political and social satire evidently nagged him; and he delayed long enough to have somebody—Swift said it was Andrew Tooke, 1 a learned schoolmaster and F.R.S., soon to become Master of Charterhouse— castrate the text. This editor softened the attack on lawyers, reversed some of the sense of the attack on prime ministers, and excised the allegory of Wood’s patent in Laputa, Chapter Three. He made many further changes calculated to enrage Swift, who sometimes did not mind simple deletions 2 but always resented insertions.
