Butler, Samuel
Butler, Samuel (1835–1902). Butler's grandfather was a bishop and his father a canon of Lincoln and he would have followed them into the church had he not developed religious doubts after graduating with a first from St John's College, Cambridge. He then spent five years sheep-farming in New Zealand, partly to escape from his father. Butler had many talents, was a very competent painter and photographer, and wrote music. As a man of letters, he turned to many forms, including scientific exposition, poetry, theological disputation, Greek translation, art, and travel. His first success was a satirical novel Erewhon (‘Nowhere’), published in 1872, and depicting a country in which illness was a crime and the use of machinery forbidden. His posthumous novel The Way of all Flesh (1903) was written over many years and is partly autobiographical. It contained thinly disguised and brutal portraits of his father and grandfather—‘could any decrepitude be so awful as childhood in a happy, united god-fearing family?’. That Butler was ‘in an odd way dependent on the disapproval of his father’ is a perceptive comment.
J. A. Cannon
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Butler, Samuel