Gulliver's Travels: Political Satire To the uniformed Gulliver's Travels is just a humorous adventure, but it was written to expose the many problems with the British Society at the time. The culture Jonathan Swift lived in was not what one would call a utopia. The English culture of the late seventeenth century to the middle eighteenth century was riddled with civil unrest and political corruptness. This setting provided Swift an abundance of topics for which to base his greatest work, Gulliver's Travels. Many political people and events in Swift's time made their way into the novel as some sort of character or situation. Jonathan