Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler (born Dec. 4, 1835, Langar Rectory, Nottinghamshire, Eng.—died June 18, 1902, London) was an English novelist, essayist, and critic whose satire Erewhon (1872) foreshadowed the collapse of the Victorian illusion of eternal progress. The Way of All Flesh (1903), his autobiographical novel, is generally considered his masterpiece.

Butler was the son of the Reverend Thomas Butler and grandson of Samuel Butler, headmaster of Shrewsbury School and later bishop of Lichfield. After six years at Shrewsbury, the young Samuel went to St. John’s College, Cambridge, and was graduated in 1858. His father wished him to be a clergyman, and young Butler actually went as far as to do a little “slumming” in a London parish by way of preparation for holy orders. But the whole current of his highly independent and heretical nature was carrying him away from everything his father stood for: home, church, and Christianity itself—or what Christianity had appeared to mean at Langar Rectory. Butler returned to Cambridge and continued his musical studies and drawing, but after an unpleasant altercation with his father he left Cambridge, the church, and home and emigrated to New Zealand, where (with funds advanced by his father) he set up a sheep run in the Canterbury settlement.

When Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) came into his hands soon after his arrival in New Zealand, it took him by storm; he became “one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers,” and a year or two later he told a friend that he had renounced Christianity altogether. Yet, as it proved, Christianity had by no means finished with him. For the next 25 years it was upon religion and evolution that Butler’s attention was mainly fixed. At first he welcomed Darwinism because it enabled him to do without God (or rather, without his father’s God). Later, having found a God of his own, he rejected Darwinism itself because it left God out. Thus, he antagonized both the church and the orthodox Darwinians and spent his life as a lonely outsider, or as Butler called himself after the biblical outcast, “an Ishmael.” To the New Zealand Press he contributed several articles on Darwinian topics, of which two—“Darwin Among the Machines” (1863) and “Lucubratio Ebria” (1865)—were later worked up in Erewhon. Both show him already grappling with the central problem of his later thought: the relationship between mechanism and life. In the former he tries out the consequences of regarding machines as living organisms competing with man in the struggle for existence. In the “Lucubratio” he takes the opposite view that machines are extracorporeal limbs and that the more of these a man can tack on to himself the more highly evolved an organism he will be.

Having doubled his capital in New Zealand, Butler returned to England (1864) and took the apartment in Clifford’s Inn, London, which was to be his home for the rest of his life. In 1865 his Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ . . . Critically Examined appeared anonymously. For a few years he studied painting at Heatherley’s art school and tried to convince himself that this was his vocation. Until 1876 he exhibited occasionally at the Royal Academy. One of his oil paintings, “Mr. Heatherley’s Holiday” (1874), is in the Tate Gallery, London, and his “Family Prayers,” in which the ethos of Langar Rectory is satirically conveyed, is at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Later he tried his hand at musical composition, publishing Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues and Other Short Pieces for the Piano (1885), and Narcissus, a comic cantata in the style of Handel—whom he rated high above all other composers—in 1888; Ulysses: An Oratorio appeared in 1904. It was typical of Butler to use his native gifts and mother wit in such exploits, and even in literature, his rightful territory, much of his work is that of the shrewd amateur who sets out to sling pebbles at the Goliaths of the establishment. “I have never,” he said, “written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong”; hence his assault on the citadels of orthodox Darwinism and orthodox Christianity; hence, later, his attempt to prove that the Odyssey was written in Sicily by a woman (The Authoress of the Odyssey, 1897); and hence his new interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets (Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered, and in Part Rearranged, 1899).

Erewhon (1872) made whatever reputation as a writer Butler enjoyed in his lifetime; it was the only one of his many books on which he made any profit worth mentioning, and he made only £69 3s. 10d. on that. Yet Erewhon (“nowhere” rearranged) was received by many as the best thing of its kind since Gulliver’s Travels—that is to say, as a satire on contemporary life and thought conveyed by the time-honoured convention of travel in an imaginary country. The opening chapters, based upon Butler’s recollections of the upper Rangitoto Mountains in New Zealand, are in an excellent narrative style; and a description of the hollow statues at the top of the pass, vibrating in the wind with unearthly chords, makes a highly effective transition to the strange land beyond. The landscape and people of Erewhon are idealized from northern Italy; its institutions are partly utopian and partly satiric inversions of our own world. Butler’s two main themes, religion and evolution, appear respectively in “The Musical Banks” (churches) and in chapters called “Some Erewhonian Trials” and “The Book of the Machines.” The Erewhonians have long ago abolished machines as dangerous competitors in the struggle for existence, and by punishing disease as a crime they have produced a race of great physical beauty and strength.

The Fair Haven (1873) is an ironical defense of Christianity, which under the guise of orthodox zeal undermines its miraculous foundations. Butler was dogged all through life by the sense of having been bamboozled by those who should have been his betters; he had been taken in by his parents and their religion; he was taken in again by friends, who returned neither the money nor the friendship they accepted from Butler for years; life itself, and the world, sometimes seemed to him a hollow sham. Was Darwin himself, his saviour from the world of Langar Rectory, now to prove a fraud as well? This was the suspicion that dawned upon him while writing Life and Habit (1878) and envenomed the series of evolutionary books that followed: Evolution, Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck or Cunning (1887). Darwin had not really explained evolution at all, Butler reasoned, because he had not accounted for the variations on which natural selection worked. Where Darwin saw only chance, Butler saw the effort on the part of creatures to respond to felt needs. He conceived creatures as acquiring necessary habits (and organs to perform them) and transmitting these to their offspring as unconscious memories. He thus restored teleology to a world from which purpose had been excluded by Darwin, but instead of attributing the purpose to God he placed it within the creatures themselves as the life force.

Many regard The Way of All Flesh, published in 1903, the year after Butler’s death, as his masterpiece. It certainly contains much of the quintessence of Butlerism. This largely autobiographical novel tells, with ruthless wit, realism, and lack of sentiment, the story of Butler’s escape from the suffocating moral atmosphere of his home circle. In it, the character Ernest Pontifex stands for Butler’s early self and Overton for his mature self; Theobald and Christina are his parents; Towneley and Alethea represent “nice” people who “love God” in Butler’s special sense of having “good health, good looks, good sense, experience, and a fair balance of cash in hand.” The book was influential at the beginning of the anti-Victorian reaction and helped turn the tide against excessive parental dominance and religious rigidity.