Samuel Butler (author)

Samuel Butler 1835-1902, English author. He was the son and grandson of eminent clergymen. In 1859, refusing to be ordained, he went to New Zealand, where he established a sheep farm and in a few years made a modest fortune. He returned to England in 1864 and devoted himself to a variety of interests, including art, music, biology, and literature. Besides exhibiting some of his paintings (1868-76) at the Royal Academy, he composed several works in collaboration with Henry Festings Jones, among them the Handelian Narcissus: A Dramatic Cantata (1888). His Erewhon, in which he satirized English social and economic injustices by describing a country in which manners and laws were the reverse of those in England, appeared in 1872. It brought Butler immediate literary fame. Erewhon Revisited was published in 1901. Butler opposed Darwin's explanation of evolution, finding it too mechanistic, and he expounded his own theories in Evolution Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification? (1887). In his single novel, the autobiographical The Way of All Flesh (1903), he attacked the Victorian pattern of life, in particular the ecclesiastical environment in which he was reared. Brilliantly ironic and witty, The Way of All Flesh is ranked among the great English novels. Butler's notebooks were published in 1912.

Bibliography: See selections from the notebooks ed. by G. Keynes and B. Hill (1951). See also A. Sliver, ed., The Family Letters of Samuel Butler, 1841-1886 (1962); biographies by H. F. Jones (1921, repr. 1973), L. E. Holt (1964), and P. Henderson (1953, repr. 1967); study by W. G. Becker (1925, repr. 1964).

Butler, Samuel (1835–1902) British satirical writer. His famous novel Erewhon (1872) is a classic utopian criticism of contemporary social and economic injustice. He produced a sequel to his early masterpiece, Erewhon Revisited (1901), and the autobiographical The Way of All Flesh (1903), a biting attack on Victorian life and the values of his own upbringing.

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Butler, Samuel (1612–80). Poet and satirist. Few records of Butler's life survive, but after education at Worcester he served as clerk or secretary to a succession of noble families, gaining easy access to libraries. His commonplace books, however, say much about his ideas and opinions: in many respects a Baconian, with a practical and realistic outlook though temperamentally gloomy unless stimulated by claret, he was deeply conscious of the self-deception, hypocrisy, and folly of mankind. His scepticism found outlet in satire, where even the newly founded Royal Society was mocked. Publication of the burlesque Hudibras (1662) brought a brief period of fame before he relapsed into comparative obscurity again. Although the legend of his poverty and neglect was probably exaggerated, it was not until 1677 that a royal pension was forthcoming, and he died poor and disappointed.

A. S. Hargreaves