Gave me her Hand to kiss

Charles Edmund Brock

Photomechanical reproduction of pen and ink drawing

4 x 3¼ inches

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 41

Brock effectively captures the weird incongruities of scale in Swift’s fantastical allegory, focusing on the difference between Gulliver’s gigantic face and the intricate smallness of the Lilliputians, who are dressed in minutely detailed costumes. The difficulties of even seeing so small a hand is brilliantly conveyed in Gulliver’s downward glance as he attempts to see what he is doing.

Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke.