Samuel Butler Popular Books

Samuel Butler Biography & Facts

Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (published posthumously in 1903 with substantial revisions and published in its original form in 1964 as Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh). Both novels have remained in print since their initial publication. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted. Early life Butler was born on 4 December 1835 at the rectory in the village of Langar, Nottinghamshire. His father was Rev. Thomas Butler, son of Dr. Samuel Butler, then headmaster of Shrewsbury School and later Bishop of Lichfield. Dr. Butler was the son of a tradesman and descended from a line of yeomen, but his scholarly aptitude being recognised at a young age, he had been sent to Rugby and Cambridge, where he distinguished himself. His only son, Thomas, wished to go into the Navy but succumbed to paternal pressure and entered the Anglican clergy, in which he led an undistinguished career, in contrast to his father's. Samuel's immediate family created for him an oppressive home environment (chronicled in The Way of All Flesh). Thomas Butler, states one critic, "to make up for having been a servile son, became a bullying father." Samuel Butler's relations with his parents, especially with his father, were largely antagonistic. His education began at home and included frequent beatings, as was not uncommon at the time. Samuel wrote later that his parents were "brutal and stupid by nature". He later recorded that his father "never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollections I can call to mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him.... I have never passed a day without thinking of him many times over as the man who was sure to be against me." Under his parents' influence, he was set on course to follow his father into the priesthood. He was sent to Shrewsbury at age twelve, where he did not enjoy the hard life under its headmaster Benjamin Hall Kennedy, whom he later drew as "Dr. Skinner" in The Way of All Flesh. Then, in 1854, he went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a first in Classics in 1858. The graduate society of St John's is named the Samuel Butler Room (SBR) in his honour. Career After Cambridge, he went to live in a low-income parish in London 1858–1859 as preparation for his ordination into the Anglican clergy; there he discovered that infant baptism made no apparent difference to the morals and behaviour of his peers and began questioning his faith. This experience would later serve as inspiration for his work The Fair Haven. Correspondence with his father about the issue failed to set his mind at peace, instead inciting his father's wrath. As a result, in September 1859, on the ship Roman Emperor, he emigrated to New Zealand. Butler went there, like many early British settlers of materially privileged origins, to maximise distance between himself and his family. He wrote of his arrival and life as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), and he made a handsome profit when he sold his farm, but his chief achievement during his time there consisted of drafts and source material for much of his masterpiece Erewhon. Erewhon revealed Butler's long interest in Darwin's theories of biological evolution. In 1863, four years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the editor of a New Zealand newspaper, The Press, published a letter captioned "Darwin among the Machines", written by Butler, but signed Cellarius. It compares human evolution to machine evolution, prophesying that machines would eventually replace humans in the supremacy of the earth: "In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race". The letter raises many of the themes now debated by proponents of the technological singularity, for example that computers evolve much faster than humans and that we are racing toward an unknowable future through explosive technological change. Butler also spent time criticising Darwin, partly because Butler (in the shadow of a previous Samuel Butler) believed that Darwin had not sufficiently acknowledged his grandfather Erasmus Darwin's contribution to his theory. Butler returned to England in 1864, settling in rooms in Clifford's Inn (near Fleet Street), where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1872, the Utopian novel Erewhon appeared anonymously, causing some speculation as to who the author was. When Butler revealed himself, Erewhon made him a well-known figure, more because of this speculation than for its literary merits, which have been undisputed. He was less successful when he lost money investing in a Canadian steamship company and in the Canada Tanning Extract Company, in which he and his friend Charles Pauli were made nominal directors. In 1874 Butler went to Canada, "fighting fraud of every kind" in an attempt to save the company, which collapsed, reducing his own capital to £2,000. In 1839 his grandfather Dr. Butler had left Samuel property at Whitehall in Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, so long as he survived his own father and his aunt, Dr. Butler's daughter Harriet Lloyd. While at Cambridge in 1857 he sold the Whitehall mansion and six acres to his cousin Thomas Bucknall Lloyd, but kept the remaining land surrounding the mansion. His aunt died in 1880 and his father's death in 1886 resolved his financial problems for the last 16 years of his own life. The land at Whitehall was sold for housing development; he laid out and named four roads – Bishop and Canon Streets after his grandfather's and father's clerical titles, Clifford Street after his London home, and Alfred Street in gratitude to his clerk. When in the 1870s his old Shrewsbury School proposed to relocate to a site at Whitehall, Butler publicly opposed it and the school ultimately moved elsewhere. Butler indulged himself, holidaying in Italy every summer and while there, producing his works on the Italian landscape and art. His close interest in the art of the Sacri Monti is reflected in Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881) and Ex Voto (1888). He wrote a number of other books, including a less successful sequel, Erewhon Revisited. His semi-autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh, did not appear in print until after his death, as he considered its tone of satirical attack on Victorian morality too contentious at the time. Butler died on 18 June 1902, aged 66, in a nursing home in St. John's Wood Road, London. By his wish, he was cremated at Woking Crematorium and by differing accounts, his ashes were dispersed or buried in an unmarked grave. George Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster admired the later Samuel Butler, who brought a new tone into Victorian literature and began a long tra.... Discover the Samuel Butler popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Samuel Butler books.