On October 28, 1726, the London bookseller Benjamin Motte published Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, “first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships.” There was no other author’s name. Everyone who mattered soon knew it was by Jonathan Swift, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, but Swift kept up the joke, and the secrecy was also prudent. Motte was nervous enough about the book’s attacks on politicians to have some passages softened before printing, which annoyed Swift a great deal.

The book is a parody of the travel writing that was hugely popular at the time. Gulliver, a plain and rather literal-minded man, is shipwrecked or stranded four times. In Lilliput, the people are six inches tall, and their two great parties fight bitterly over whether to break boiled eggs at the big end or the little end. In Brobdingnag the people are giants, and the kindly king, after hearing Gulliver’s proud account of English history, concludes that most of humankind must be “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin.” Then come a flying island of absent-minded scientists, and finally a land ruled by wise, gentle horses, the Houyhnhnms, where the brutish creatures called Yahoos turn out to be human beings.

It sold out within days. Swift’s friend John Gay wrote to him a few weeks later that it was “universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery.” That remark points to the strange double life the book has led ever since. Cut down, it became a favorite children’s story about tiny people and giants. Read whole, it is one of the darkest satires ever written about human pride.

It has left a deep mark on the language. “Lilliputian” means tiny, a “yahoo” is a lout, and in 1980 a computer scientist borrowed Swift’s egg war to name a dispute over the order in which computers store bytes, still called “big-endian” and “little-endian” today.

Swift once wrote that his chief aim in all his work was “to vex the world rather than divert it.” He managed both.