Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

English novelist

• Born: December 4, 1835
• Birthplace: Langar Rectory, Nottinghamshire, England
• Died: June 18, 1902
• Place of death: London, England

Butler is a nineteenth century example of what later came to be known as a Renaissance man. He trained in the classics but was more interested in the arts and wrote both an outstanding utopian novel and an important autobiographical novel, as well as four books about Darwinian theory, a travel book, translations of the classics, and an analysis of William Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Early Life

Samuel Butler’s childhood, which he later fictionalized in The Way of All Flesh (1903), was an unhappy one. His father, the Reverend Thomas Butler, was a clergyman who instilled religion and learning through a liberal use of punishment, and his mother provided no relief. When Samuel was ten, he attended a private school near Coventry to prepare him for Shrewsbury School, where his grandfather and father had taught. Although Samuel’s father had prepared him for Greek and Latin, his own chief interests at Shrewsbury were art and music. In 1853, before he completed his classical studies at Shrewsbury, he persuaded his father and his headmaster to let him interrupt his studies so he could go to Europe with his family. After his return to England, he won a scholarship to St. John’s College at Cambridge.

In 1857, Butler did a walking tour of Switzerland and Italy, which he described in a piece written for The Eagle, a St. John’s journal that he had helped found. The following year he took a first class in classical studies and then spent six months doing volunteer parish work in the London slums in preparation for a career in the ministry. During that time he realized that he was not suited for his intended vocation; however, his father wanted him either to be ordained or to become an educator. Butler knew that his father would not finance his studies in art or music, so he instead proposed emigrating to New Zealand and to become a farmer.

In September of 1859, Butler went to New Zealand, bought land, and stocked it with sheep. During the next four years he built a home he called Mesopotamia, prospered, and, leaving his property under the supervision of friends, moved to New Zealand’s major city, Christchurch. There his reading of Charles Darwin prompted him to publish an essay in the Press on Darwinian ideas on evolution, which were the antithesis of what his father had taught him.

Without his approval or knowledge, his father used his letters and some pieces that he had written for The Eagle and published A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), to which he added his own preface.

Life’s Work

In 1864, Butler sold his New Zealand holdings at a considerable profit and returned to England. After settling in at Clifford’s Inn in London, be pursued a painting career, studying at Heatherley’s Art School. In 1874, his paintings Mr. Heatherley’s Holiday and A Child’s Head were exhibited at the Royal Academy. His real talent was writing, however, and in 1872 he published Erewhon , a kind of satiric utopian novel, which he had printed at his own expense.

Erewhon was Butler’s only book that made a profit, and it went through nine editions during his lifetime. It is essentially an imaginative rendering of how his rebellion against his father, his New Zealand experience, and his reading of Darwin liberated him. The book is a journey to a land that is simultaneously utopian and satiric, in some ways similar to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Butler’s comments on the dangers posed by machines were at odds with the Industrial Revolution that brought so much prosperity to some Englishmen. Not surprisingly, the novel received a great deal of critical attention, most of it negative. In 1873, Butler published his second novel, The Fair Haven , which troubled readers because of its subtlety, caused in part by his use of two imaginary authors who may or may not reflect Butler’s own views. The book is ostensibly a defense of Christ’s Resurrection, and some people read it that way, but it also is an attack on the miraculous.

Butler began using the reading room of the British Museum in 1877 and continued his interest in Darwin by writing four books on evolution. In Life and Habit (1877) he modified Darwin’s ideas about development occurring as the result of pure chance, affected by natural selection or the survival of the fittest. He introduced the idea of “unconscious memory,” a mental process to complement the Darwinian mechanical process. In some ways he was on the same track as Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, but his work lacked the scientific apparatus of Freud’s work.

In Evolution Old and New (1879), Butler asserted that Darwin’s work was not as original as was generally thought and went on to use the works of the French naturalists Comte Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon and Chevalier de Lamarck to buttress his ideas about “unconscious memory.” His book Unconscious Memory (1880) continues the attack on Darwin, who, Butler claims, fails to explain why variations occur. In 1887, he published Luck or Cunning , which, in addition to covering old ground, comments on the attacks he has endured and the controversy over evolution.

Despite his forays into scientific speculation, Butler retained his early interest in music and art. With his friend Henry Festing Jones, also an admirer of George Frederik Handel’s music, he published Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues, and Other Short Pieces for the Piano (1885). After the two men continued their study of harmony, he published Narcissus: A Cantata in the Handelian Form (1888). In 1904, after Butler’s death, his collaboration with Jones, Ulysses: An Oratorio, was published.

Butler’s interest in Handel is also reflected in his Alps and Sanctuaries (1882), which begins with a comparison of Handel and William Shakespeare, giving the nod to Handel. This book, which includes several of Butler’s sketches, is also a travel book with commentaries on Italian art and Roman Catholicism. In this good-natured, insightful book there is a mellowing and a regret that his narrow religious upbringing may have made him unduly skeptical of religion.

Butler’s work on the oratorio about Ulysses sparked a return to his interest in the classics, and his Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), in which he claims that the Odyssey was written by a woman, was the result. He followed this work with translations of Homer’s Odyssey (1888) and Iliad (1890). These modern translations of the two epics received some favorable reviews but did not do well commercially.

Butler’s last work on the classics was Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered and in Part Rearranged (1899), in which he undertook to explore what he called the “more Greek than English” relationship between Shakespeare and “Mr. W. H.” Before his death in 1902 he extensively revised his utopian novel as Erewhon Revisited , which satirizes Christianity and all similar religions. His posthumously published novel, The Way of All Flesh (1903), which he started writing in 1873 and modeled on his own life, is a Bildungsroman—a coming-of-age story—in which Butler uses his theory of the unconscious and his knowledge of Handel to show how his protagonist comes to develop and realize his own personality.

Significance

Butler had to finance the publication of most of his writings himself, and Erewhon was his only profitable work. Consequently, he did not have a significant impact on a mass audience during his lifetime. However, he did reach the intellectuals and scientists of the day, even if they often disagreed with him. The Way of All Flesh and The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), which his friend Festing Jones edited after his death, did enhance his reputation. The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler (1923-1926) made his work available for the reading public. At the turn of the twenty-first century, editions of most of his books were still in print.

After World War I, in which Great Britain lost nearly a full generation of young men, Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, with its theme of rebellion against the father—and by extension all father figures—appealed to a generation unhappy with the Victorian mores and religion in which they were raised. In his History of the English Novel(1934) critic Ernest A. Baker compared Butler’s influence on novelists with that of the French writers Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. Moreover, time has shown that some of Butler’s ideas about the unconscious are valid and are tied to what has become the field of social psychology.

Butler had the misfortune to be what is now popularly known as a Renaissance man, a person accomplished in many fields at a time when specialization was in vogue. In effect, he may be considered a bit of a dilettante. He also appeared to vacillate, to say, or seem to say, contradictory things. His ambiguity and complexity, however, are more suited to the twentieth than to the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Holt, Lee E. Samuel Butler. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. This book has a brief biographical chapter followed by analyses of Butler’s literary works. Also contains a chronology and a bibliography of works by and about Butler.

Jeffers, Thomas L. Samuel Butler Revalued. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1981. Focuses on The Way of All Flesh, Butler’s lifelong work, which involves his family, the Christianity of his father, and Darwinism.

Jones, Henry Festing. Samuel Butler: A Memoir. 2 vols. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. Originally published in 1919. Biography written by Butler’s Cambridge friend and fellow musicologist.

Muggeridge, Malcolm. Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler. New York: Haskell House, 1971. Originally published in 1936. Vicious attack on Butler, whom Muggeridge sees, contrary to received opinion, as the epitome of a Victorian writer.

Raby, Peter. Samuel Butler: A Biography. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Well-illustrated biography that ties Butler’s work and life together.

Stillman, Clara G. Samuel Butler: A Mid-Victorian Modern. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1932. Early work focusing more on biography than literary analysis. Some illustrations.