The Way of All Flesh (World's Classics) - Softcover

Butler, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192829807 ISBN 13: 9780192829801

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1993

Synopsis

The Way of All Flesh (1903) `exploded like a bomb' in Edwardian England. Based on Samuel Butler's own life and published posthumously, it indicts Victorian bourgeois values as personified in five generations of the Pontifex family. Butler's satire centres on Ernest Pontifex, an orthodox young man who suddenly sees the falseness of the rules and aspirations forced on him by parents and teachers. He renounces his past morally, religiously, and socially - with startling results. Ernest's passage through self-deception and disgrace to nonchalant, hedonistic wisdom makes this one of the most involving novels of its era. Butler's candour spoke not only to the restless Edwardians, rebelling against the nineteenth century, but also continues to enthral readers today. In his Introduction to this richly annotated edition Michael Mason points out and explains the importance of the personal and public allusions which reverberate through the novel. This book is intended for general readers, those interested in Victorian fiction, students of 19th-century English literature at 6th form, undergraduate and post-graduate level.

About this title

Review

It is read, I believe, mostly by the young, bent on making out a case against their elders, but Butler was fifty when he stopped working on it, and no reader much under that age is likely to appreciate the full beauty of its horrors. . . . Every contemporary novelist with a developed sense of irony is probably in some measure, directly or indirectly, indebted to Butler, who had the misfortune to be a twentieth-century man born in the year 1835 --The New Yorker

About the Author

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was an author, literary critic, philosopher, painter and translator of Homer. After a disagreement about his career with his father, a clergyman who had been pressured into joining the Church by his own father, Butler left England to become a sheep farmer in New Zealand. The letters he wrote to his father from here formed the basis of his utopian satire Erewhon. The Way of All Flesh, a semi-autobiographical exploration of Victorian family life and indictment of Victorian hypocrisy, was published posthumously in 1903.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0192829807
• ISBN 13: 9780192829801
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 478
• Editor: Mason Michael