Ladybird Tuesday: Gulliver's Travels

I haven't done one of these Ladybird Tuesday things for some time, so I thought I'd have another go. On a recent trip to an antiquarian book shop, I came across some older Ladybird books from the 1970s. Given how cheap they were (under £3), I picked up a couple, including this one, an adaptation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels dated from 1976. Flicking through the pages, I vaguely remember this book from when I was younger but it didn't have the same cover. On the back it is listed as being part of Series 770 (I wonder why a publish would label and market each of their series with a number, but anyway...). According to a quick bit of research is a series of retellings of classics, legends and fables. I like the cover of this book - a nice break from the now clichéd image of Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputian army.

Odds are we know the basic premise of Gulliver's Travels. English doctor Lemmuel Gulliver goes on a number of sea voyages, but each time storms and other such calamities lands him in a variety of strange, undiscovered lands. In Swift's original novel, the worlds Gulliver visits and the things he witnesses satirise the culture, philosophy and politics of the eighteenth century, and still resonate today.

Obviously a short story from the Brothers Grimm or the Arabian Nights is easy enough to confine to 52 pages of text and illustration, but a long and complex novel like Gulliver's Travels requires more abridging. As such, only the first two parts of the original novel (the voyage to the miniature island of Lilliput and the the voyage to the giant island of Brobdingnag) are covered in what are essentially summaries of the original text. Of course, there's also some bowdlerisation. It's been around ten years since I read the original novel, but I noticed in this edition the glaring omission of Gulliver urinating to put out a fire in Lilliput.

One could easily condemn the practice of condensing great works of literature into simplified children's editions, but it's hardly worthy of utter disdain. Books like Gulliver's Travels, though written for adults, have always been promoted to children even if the sheer complexity of the original text isn't going to be understood by most ten year-olds. To some extent, I suppose retellings such as this exist not to replace the original for young readers but merely to introduce them to great works of literature while it's still not that accessible to them, which is a very noble idea. I'll also give this adaptation (written by a woman named Marie Stuart) some credit for using the first person as per Swift.

In any case, as an adult and artist, the reason why I was interested in picking this up was the same reason for any vintage Ladybird book: the illustrations. In addition to the satire, one of the key reasons Swift's story has endured is due to the fantastic imagery, and seeing it fully illustrated here is what makes it so interesting. The illustrator Martin Aitchison's style is quintessentially 70s, but the illustrations do capture the fantasy and adventure and are full of character, all of which are vital in such a peculiar story. They also freely use however much space they want to, unlike some of the older Ladybird books which confine text to one side of the page and picture to the other. This makes for some good panoramic shots like when Gulliver is tied down in Lilliput and smaller, almost anecdotal images for pages that require longer bouts of texts.

There are some good portrait pictures as well. I particularly like the forced perspective used for the scene where Gulliver dances for the giants of Brobdingnag (which, I will add, I cannot pronounce and had to copy from the Wikipedia page on Gulliver's Travels). I must say, though, that they should have used a better font. I don't know what typeface they used, but it looks a lot like Arial or Helvetica. Arial to me, makes me think of computer manuals and ingredients packets, not a great adventure on the high seas.

Ladybird Tuesday was an idea started by Being Mrs C.