Jonathan Swift’s famous book is known to us as “Gulliver’s Travels” because, apparently at the last minute, he put the name “Lemuel Gulliver” on the title page as the author. Where did that name come from? I am not the first to figure this out, but it seems to be a fact so little known that it almost counts as an original discovery: there was a bookseller named Lawton Gilliver with whom Swift and the Scriblerians were associated. It is typical of Swift to make an insulting pun on the name of someone he knew, and given the name “Gilliver,” what other pun could Swift possibly make in order to put his name on the title page of a book of exceedingly improbable and unbelievable adventures?
I only noticed this because I was looking for a good edition of Pope’s works, and found that a very expensive-looking edition was published by Lawton Gilliver in 1735. The bells immediately rang. Association with Pope is enough to prove association with Swift, but I did find his name mentioned here and there in connection with Swift as well.
Google and DuckDuckGo each return exactly one legitimate result for Gilliver and Gulliver together: an article from the Huntington Library Quarterly in 1949 that appears to have made the same discovery. Google finds this text in it: “…seller Lawton Gilliver, who became Pope’s regular publisher for the next eight years. The similarity between the names Lawton Gilliver and Lemuel Gulliver is…” On every other page that mentions both names, “Gilliver” is a misprint for “Gulliver,” or vice versa, all doubtless due to the position of the U and I keys on a QWERTY keyboard.