The Way of All Flesh: Introduction by P. N. Furbank (Everyman's Library Classics) - Hardcover

Butler, Samuel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679417184 ISBN 13: 9780679417187

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 1992

Synopsis

Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butler's death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex family. A thinly veiled account of his own upbringing in the bosom of a God-fearing Christian family, Butler's scathingly funny depiction of the self-righteous hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life was hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement."

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:

P. N. Furbank is Emeritus Professor of the Open University and author of Samuel Butler: 1835-1902. Other publications include E. M. Forster: A Life; Italo Svevo: the Man and the Writer; Unholy Pleasure: the Idea of Social Class and, most recently, Diderot: A Critical Biography.

About this edition

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0679417184
• ISBN 13: 9780679417187
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416