Study Questions

1. What do the Maids of Honor do in front of Gulliver and why?

2. How does their action affect him?

3. How does Gulliver escape from a monkey?

4. What is the King’s reaction to Gulliver’s escape?

5. How does Gulliver react to the King’s reaction?

6. What does Gulliver do after watching the King of Brobdingnag shave?

7. How does Gulliver try to perform musically in Brobdingnag?

8. What does the King of Brobdingnag think of Gulliver’s description of England?

9. Why does he hold this attitude?

10. What is the King’s attitude to religious freedom?

Answers

1. The Maids of Honor undress before Gulliver, not being ashamed any more than if he were a small animal.

2. Gulliver finds the magnified physical imperfections of the Maids disgusting.

3. Men with ladders are sent to the roof of a building to rescue Gulliver from the monkey.

4. The King thinks Gulliver’s narrow escape from death at the hands of the monkey is amusing.

5. Gulliver feels, when the King is amused at Gulliver’s account of his narrow escape, like an awkward social climber.

6. After watching the King shave, Gulliver uses some bristles of the King’s hair and some wood splinters and makes a comb.

7. Gulliver tries to play a sixty-foot-long spinet (piano-like instrument).

8. The King of Brobdingnag, after hearing Gulliver’s description of England, thinks, despite Gulliver’s patriotism, that the English are the “most pernicious race of odious little vermin that Nature ever suffered (allowed) to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

9. The King holds a very negative opinion of the English because of their political and moral corruption.

10. The King thinks that people should hold harmful religious views in private only, not in public.