A Voyage to Cacklogallinia / With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country

A VOYAGE TO CACKLOGALLINIA with a description of the religion, policy, customs and manners of that country By Captain Samuel Brunt reproduced from the original edition, 1727, with an introduction by marjorie nicolson
Published for THE FACSIMILE TEXT SOCIETY By COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK: MCMXL
A Voyage to Cacklogallinia appeared in London, in 1727, from the pen of a pseudonymous Captain Samuel Brunt. Posterity has continued to preserve the anonymity of the author, perhaps more jealously than he would have wished. Whatever his real parentage, he must for the present be referred only to the literary family of which his progenitor Captain Lemuel Gulliver is the most distinguished member. Like so many other works of that period, A Voyage to Cacklogallinia has sometimes been attributed to Swift; its similarities to the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels are unmistakable. Again, the work has sometimes been attributed to Defoe. There is, however, no good reason to believe that either Defoe or Swift was concerned in its authorship, except in so far as both gave impetus to lesser writers in this form of composition.
Fortunately the authorship of the work is of little importance. It lives, not because of anything remarkable in the style or anything original in its author's point of view, but because of its satiric reflection of the background of its age. It is republished both because of its historical value and because of its peculiarly contemporary appeal today. Its satire needs no learned paraphernalia of footnotes; it can be readily understood and appreciated by readers in an age dominated on the one hand by economics and on the other, by science. Its satire—not too subtle—is as pertinent in our own period as it was two hundred years ago. Its irony is concerned with stock exchanges and feverish speculation. It is a tale of incredible inflation and abrupt and devastating depression. Its voyage to the moon has not lost its appeal to men and women who can still remember a period when human flights seemed incredible and who have lived to see flying chariots spanning oceans and continents and ascending into the stratosphere.