Butler, Samuel

Butler, Samuel (1835–1902), grandson of Dr Samuel Butler, headmaster of Shrewsbury School and bishop of Lichfield. He went to New Zealand, where he achieved success as a sheep-farmer. A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863) was compiled by his father from Samuel's letters and became the core of Erewhon. He returned to England in 1864 and settled in Clifford's Inn, where he began to study painting. Erewhon (1872), published anonymously, enjoyed a brilliant but brief success. The Fair Haven (1873), an elaborate and ironic attack on the Resurrection, brought him encouragement from C. Darwin and L. Stephen. A journey to Canada in 1874–5 inspired his well-known poem ‘A Psalm of Montreal’, first printed in the Spectator in May 1878.

Butler produced a series of works of scientific controversy, many of them directed against certain aspects of Darwinism, in particular C. Darwin's theory of natural selection: they include Evolution, Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and three articles on ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism’ (The Universal Review, 1890). Butler's espousal of the cause of Lamarck and creative evolution won him the praise of G. B. Shaw in his preface to Back to Methuselah (1921); Shaw also praised Butler's outspoken views on religion and the ‘importance of money’ in his preface to Major Barbara (1907).

Butler published Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881), the first of several animated works on art and travel. He experimented with musical composition, including a comic pastoral oratorio, Narcissus (1888), written in collaboration with his great friend Festing Jones. In 1896 appeared his The Life and Letters of Dr Samuel Butler, his revered grandfather. A long interest in Homer led to his theory of the feminine authorship of the Odyssey and its origin at Trapani in Sicily. The Authoress of the ‘Odyssey’ appeared in 1897, and translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey into vigorous colloquial prose in 1898 and 1900. A quirky study, Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered, appeared in 1899, and Erewhon Revisited in 1901. Butler's most revealing work was his semi-autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh (1903). He left six large Notebooks, full of incident, self-revelation, and ideas; selections of these were published by Festing Jones in 1912.