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From The Gulliver Code

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The language of the Houyhnhnms is particularly challenging. It most likely originated in the members of the Scriblerus Club - Lord Oxford, Lord Bolingbroke, Alexander Pope, John Gay, Jonathan Swift and Thomas Parnell - teasing fellow member Dr. John Arbuthnot about his broad Scottish accent. Some critics have speculated that the language is a satire of High Dutch, others suggest the Hanoverians of the Court.

Much of the satire in the Travels, and perhaps the anagrams themselves, seem to originate in Swift's friendly criticism of Bolingbroke's philosophizing. Certainly Bolingbroke was in some danger after the death of Queen Anne, and the anagrams could have originated in a secret code to be used among friends and Scriblerians.

My feeling is that "the anagrammatic method" originated with Dr. John Arbuthnot, a mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Queen Anne's personal physician. Arbuthnot wrote the first work on probability published in English - indeed Arbuthnot invented the word - and saw mathematics as a method of freeing the mind from superstition. He hosted the meetings of the Scriblerus Club at his own house. Because Houyhnhnm is an anagram of Arbuthnot, and Swift said of him, "there does not exist a better man," we should turn much of our focus on Arbuthnot and the Scriblerus Club.

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Anagram Origins | Scriblerus Origins | Official Secrets | Masonic Origins | Solomon's Temple | The Royal Society

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