"I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them."
With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth "in the bosom of a Christian family." With irony, wit and sometimes rancour, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning...
"I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shi...
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time The Way of All Flesh is one of the time-bombs of literature," said V. S. Pritchett. "One thinks of it lying in Samuel Butler's desk for thirty years, waiting to blow up the Victorian family and with it the whole great pillared and balustraded edifice of the Victorian novel." Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butler's death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex family. A thinly...
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time The Way of All Flesh is one of the time-bombs of literature," said...
The history of Homer and his works is lost in doubtful obscurity, as is the history of many of the first minds who have done honor to humanity because they rose amidst darkness. The majestic stream of his song, blessing and fertilizing, flows like a river through many lands and nations.
The creations of genius always seem like miracles, because they are, for the most part, created far out of the reach of observation. If we were in possession of all the historical testimonies, we never could wholly explain the origin of the Iliad and the Odyssey. But it must be noted that Homer's great...
The history of Homer and his works is lost in doubtful obscurity, as is the history of many of the first minds who have done honor to humanity beca...
Written in the tradition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, English novelist, essayist, and iconoclast Samuel Butler (1835-1902) describes an imaginary visit to a topsy-turvy country called Erewhon (an anagram of "nowhere"), where it is a punishable offense to be physically ill, but where criminality and immorality are looked kindly upon as treatable diseases. The English church is pilloried in the system of "Musical Banks," whose currency nobody believes in but everyone pretends to value. Universities teach courses on how to say nothing at great length, and all machines have been banned...
Written in the tradition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, English novelist, essayist, and iconoclast Samuel Butler (1835-1902) describes an ima...
Samuel Butler was one of the Victorian era's greatest iconoclasts. Once, he said that after reading Darwin's "The Origin of Species, " that the theory of evolution had replaced Christianity for him. And this -- after Butler had originally studied for the clergy. Darwin also praised Butler for his clear understanding of Darwin's scientific work, as expressed in a series of popular articles contributed to the "Canterbury Press." Butler's first literary success came in the form of the 1872 novel "Erewhon, " a work that was originally published anonymously, but which was an immediate popular and...
Samuel Butler was one of the Victorian era's greatest iconoclasts. Once, he said that after reading Darwin's "The Origin of Species, " that the theory...
William Bateson claimed at the Darwin Centenary in 1909 that Samuel Butler (1835 1902) was 'the most brilliant and by far the most interesting of Darwin's opponents, whose works are at length emerging from oblivion.' Best remembered today as the author of the novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, he also wrote on a range of subjects from translations of Homer to studies of evolutionary thought. In his Life and Habit (published in 1878) Butler contended that much of inheritance was based on habit making a feature ingrained, to the extent that it could pass between generations. However, he...
William Bateson claimed at the Darwin Centenary in 1909 that Samuel Butler (1835 1902) was 'the most brilliant and by far the most interesting of Darw...
