Introduction:
Finding the Gullivers
When I was growing up in Nottingham and Birmingham in the sixties and early seventies, we would often spend holidays and Christmases with my maternal grandparents in Walsgrave-on-Sowe, near Coventry. They were always full of tales, especially my Grandpa Gulliver. On one of our visits, I asked him where the name Gulliver came from, since I’d just read the 1912 children’s version of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels into several remote Nations of the World, originally published in 1726 as a satirical, social and political tract, never intended for young minds. He told me that in Banbury churchyard, I would find, railed around, a gravestone with Gullivers on. The legend of that, he went on, is supposed to be that the man that wrote Gulliver’s Travels saw that stone and thought that that’s what he’d call his book. Those are your ancestors…
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