Smith & Waugh's Satirical Voyage: From Jonathan Swift to H. G. Wells

York Literature Festival 2026

About the Talk

Join Dr Jo Waugh and Dr Adam James Smith, co-hosts of the Smith & Waugh Talk About Satire podcast and co-directors of the York Research Unit for the Study of Satire, for an exploration of fantastic voyages in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. From Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, they’ll examine how writers use other worlds to reflect, critique, and reimagine their own.

The event also uncovers some delightfully odd and overlooked works, including Peter Wilkins’s The Life and Adventures of Robert Paltock (1751) and Humphrey Lunatic’s York-printed A Trip to the Moon (1764), and invites lively discussion about the promise of other worlds and the vexing realities of our own.