Brown cloth binding with gilt title on the spine. Gilt edge decoration on the boards.

F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

A lovely copy of this great work still deserving to be read and treasured.

Gulliver’s Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, satirising both human nature and the “travellers’ tales” literary subgenre. It is Swift’s best-known full-length work, and a classic of English literature. Swift claimed that he wrote Gulliver’s Travels “to vex the world rather than divert it”.

The book was an immediate success. The English dramatist John Gay remarked: “It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery.” In 2015, Robert McCrum released his selection list of 100 best novels of all time, where he called Gulliver’s Travels “a satirical masterpiece”.

•                     A unique book which includes an insightful review by Harold Williams of both Gulliver’s Travels and its author, Jonathan Swift.

• This is the private copy of reviewer Harold Williams along with enclosed private correspondence between him and  Abel Chevalley.

Harold Whitmore Williams (6 April 1876 – 18 November 1928) was a New Zealand journalist, foreign editor of The Times and polyglot who is considered to have been one of the most accomplished polyglots in history. He is said to have known over 58 languages, including English. He “proved to know every language of the Austrian Empire”, Hungarian, Czech, Albanian, Serbian, Romanian, Swedish, Basque, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Coptic, Egyptian, Hittite, Old Irish, and other dialects. Abel Chevalley: Born the July 4 , 1868 in Mouilleron-en-Pareds (Vendée), birthplace of Georges Clemenceau and De Lattre de Tassigny , he was the eldest son of Charles Chevalley, a Swiss emigrant of Protestant religion established as a watchmaker in Vendée, and of Marie Balin, daughter adopted by the pastor of Mouilleron.
A brilliant student at the École Normale de La Roche-sur-Yon , he was admitted first to the École Normale Supérieure at Saint-Cloud in 1887; he continued his training as a scholarship holder in England (1889-1892), then was appointed teacher at the Tewfik High School in Cairo (1893-1897).
Received first in the aggregation of English in 1897, he was appointed teacher at the Lycée Voltaire then at the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris, and became the President of the association of former students of Saint-Cloud. In numerous articles and speeches, he promotes the teaching of modern languages and offers an innovative vision of popular education.
At the same time, he began a career as a journalist at the newspaper Le Temps , where he wrote articles on Egypt and then collaborated in the international section following Francis de Pressensé. He defends a rapprochement between France and the United Kingdom and publishes in 1902 a biography of Queen Victoria. In fragile health, criticized within the Quai d’Orsay for his Anglophilia and his links with Clemenceau (who refused to run for the presidency in January 1920), Abel Chevalley left his diplomatic career to devote himself to literature.

He had published in his youth with Fischbacher editions collections of poetry: First Stage (1894), Stèles et Cippes and Le Vain Exode (1896). He published Le Roman anglais de notre temps simultaneously in Oxford and Paris (1920). He presented to the French public and translated the works of Thomas Deloney to the editions of the NRF (1926), and collaborated as a literary critic with the Revue de Paris , the Mercure de France , the Saturday Review of Literarure and the Fortnightly Review .

He is preparing a series of three stories which will be published by NRF Gallimard in 1936, after his death, under the title Histoires Extraordinaires (The Beast of Gévaudan, Psalmanazar, the Overbury Affair). The first of these stories, La Bête du Gévaudan , will be regularly reprinted to the present day and will earn Abel Chevalley posthumous glory unrelated to what his career had been.

With his wife Marguerite (1880-1979), née Sabatier and daughter of the French Reformed theologian Louis Auguste Sabatier , he also authored the Concise Oxford French Dictionary (1934). They had already translated James Stephens ‘ novel , Deirdre ( 1923 ), telling this Irish myth.

Claude Chevalley , mathematician, co-founder of the Bourbaki group, was the son of Abel and Marguerite Chevalley.