The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

Sensible people get the greater part of their dying done during their own lifetime. Samuel Butler (4th December 1835 - 18th June 1902) had both a father and grandfather in the church and was being groomed by his father to be a priest. However, after a first at Cambridge, he decided he wanted to be an artist. His father could not and would not consider such a thing and by mutual consent Samuel went to New Zealand to be a sheep farmer. Here he started writing which he continued on his return to London as well as taking up painting. Whilst he did have several paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy, his talent undoubtably was in his writing but the extent of which was only really apparent after his death. This was due entirely to his great work, The Way of All Flesh published the year after he died to tumultuous acclaim which is well illustrated by George Bernard Shaw describing it as one of the summits of human achievement. The Way of All Flesh is a thinly disguised autobiographical account of his own harsh Christian upbringing as it traces the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex and his family. Along the way, it satires Victorian values and beliefs and with brilliant wit and irony offers a powerful indictment of most 19th-century institutions in England. Each generation has found that despite the book savaging Victorian hypocrisy, it still speaks to every era as ultimately the theme of young people growing up wanting a greater degree of personal freedom than their parents is very much alive and kicking in most families around the world.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was the son of a clergyman. He was educated at Shrewsbury and St John's College Cambridge and, after a disagreement with his father about his choice of career, left England to become a sheep farmer in New Zealand, where he stayed until 1864. On his return to England, he took up residence in Clifford's Inn where he stayed until his death. He began to study painting and worked at it for ten years, exhibiting occasionally at the Royal Academy. In 1872 he anonymously published Erewhon which was based on the letters he wrote to his father from New Zealand. This was followed by The Fair Haven, an attack on the Resurrection, making clear the religious skepticism which had turned Butler against a career in the church.

In the years that followed, Butler wrote several works attacking contemporary scientific ideas, in particular Darwin's theory of natural selection. In 1881 he began to write books on art and travel, the first of these being Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino. Around this time, he was also experimenting with musical composition and collaborated with Festing Jones on the oratorio entitled Narcissus. An interest in Homer led him to write lively translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey and he formed the theory that these two works were written by a woman. Butler's partly autobiographical work The Way of All Flesh was the result of many years' labor and appeared posthumously in 1903.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780486434667
ISBN 10	0486434664
Title	The Way of All Flesh
Author	Samuel Butler
Series	Thrift Editions
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Dover Publications Inc.
Year published	2004-10-29
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable