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Surprisingly little critical attention has been paid to the influence of Jonathan Swift on Victorian literature. This article argues that Swift is an important but overlooked intertextual presence in Eliot’s fiction and especially her last book, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Explicit references and indirect allusions in her fiction, as well as citations in her notebooks, journals and letters, demonstrate that Eliot knew and valued Swift’s works, especially A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels. A focus on Swift helps explain unfamiliar aspects of her writing, such as its anti-scientific strain and tendency toward satire. Recent criticism on animals in Eliot’s work has focused on Darwin, but an appreciation of the influence of the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels on her writing helps us to understand her representations of animals generally and her satirical, fabulist mode of critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such particularly.