Size Matters: Navigating Vulnerability in an Oversized World — Gulliver's Travels

Littleness turns ordinary life into a sequence of accidents. In the court gardens Glumdalclitch carries Gulliver in his smaller box until the dwarf, still in service, overhears a silly joke comparing him to dwarf apple trees and shakes a dozen Bristol, barrel apples down on Gulliver's head. Gulliver asks that the dwarf be pardoned because he provoked it. Hailstones eighteen hundred times the size of Europe's strike him flat on a grass, plot; bruised head to foot, he cannot go abroad for ten days. A gardener's spaniel picks him up in its mouth and carries him gently to its master; Glumdalclitch is in agonies, the gardener reprimanded, and the story hushed so it never reaches the queen. When left alone Gulliver hides other mishaps: a kite driven off with his hanger, a molehill to the neck, a snail shell breaking his shin. Birds hop within a yard, snatch cake from his hand, and peck his fingers; he kills a linnet the size of a swan and serves it for dinner by royal command. The maids of honour treat him like a toy without ceremony: stripping him naked, laying him in their bosoms, changing smocks in front of him, and discharging what they have drunk into vessels of three tuns while he sits on their toilet. A frolicsome sixteen, year, old plays tricks he refuses to describe; he begs Glumdalclitch never to visit her again. At an execution he watches a murderer's head cut off with a forty, foot sword; the blood spouts higher than the jet at Versailles, and the head bounces on the scaffold though Gulliver stands half an English mile away. The queen, diverting his melancholy, has a joiner build him a pleasure boat and a three, hundred, foot trough where he rows for the ladies, steers under their fan, wind, slips and hangs by a corking, pin through his breeches, and fights a huge frog out of the boat with his scull. The worst danger comes from a kitchen clerk's monkey. Left in Glumdalclitch's open closet, Gulliver is dragged out, carried like a nursling across the leads, and force, fed on a rooftop while hundreds laugh below. Stones are forbidden lest his brains be dashed out; the monkey drops him on a ridge tile before a footman pockets him down. Choked and bruised, he keeps his bed a fortnight while the court inquires daily; the monkey is killed. When Gulliver tells the king he would have wounded the beast with his hanger if he had thought of it, the court roars with laughter no respect can suppress, and he reflects how vain it is to seek honour among those with whom no equality exists. He still furnishes the court with ridiculous stories; Glumdalclitch reports his follies to amuse the queen. Trying to leap a cow, dung in a field, he lands to his knees; the footmen wipe him, the queen hears, and for days the mirth is at his expense. Protection and patronage run together: he survives because they care, and he is laughed at because they do not need to take him seriously.