Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was known throughout his life as an outcast. He was a devoutly religious Irishman who was a member of Dublin's Anglican Church. At the time he was an English Whig, as were many of his countrymen following the Irish Restoration, but early in the eighteenth century he turned his attention to the English Tory party. Swift tried lobbying Queen Anne of England the reigning monarch and the English Whig party to supply aid to the Irish church, which both factions refused to grant. This maddened Swift, who wasted no time in forging an alliance with the Tory party. After Queen Anne's death in 1714, George I of England ascended to the throne and the Whig party usurped the Tory party's power base. This did not do well for either the Irish people or the Irish church. Thereafter, Swift devoted himself to being "a lifelong propagandist for the Tory cause" and edited the Tory party's official newspaper, The Examiner. At the time Swift's chief ally was St. John Henry Viscount Bolingbroke, a dedicated Tory democrat, while his main adversary was the Whig Party's Sir Robert Walpole. While a member of the Tory's Scriblerus Club, Swift began experimenting with satirical writing. He did this recognizing it would be a way of discreetly getting his message across while solidifying his professional literary reputation. .
His greatest satirical triumph, Gulliver's Travels, was published in October of 1726, and quickly garnered a reputation as being "an allegory of eighteenth-century life." As Swift's enemies would soon painfully discover, the novel's parody of "Whiggish hubris would strike with special ferocity." Lemuel Gulliver was a forty-year-old married man who was having a mid-life crisis. He wanted to see other lands and learn about people and societies that were different from his own. In part one, he traveled to Lilliput, where there was a constant state of war between the Lilliputians and their enemies the Blefuscudians.