Background
Samuel Butler was born December 4, 1835, at his father's rectory, Langar, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom.
Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler was born December 4, 1835, at his father's rectory, Langar, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom.
Educated first at Shrewsbury, Samuel Butler graduated from St. Johns College, Cambridge, in 1858.
Samuel Butler came into open conflict with his father over the question of his future profession, and at last he emigrated to New Zealand to become a sheep farmer. In New Zealand he read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and wrote a series of newspaper articles setting forth Darwin's ideas and ingeniously applying the evolutionary hypothesis to machines.
The sheep run prospered, and in 1864, having doubled his original capital, Butler returned to England financially independent.
Erewhon (1872), Butler's first book, is a mixture of satire, utopian theories, and serious speculation masked as whimsy.
Set in the frame of a trip to an unknown land (Erewhon is an anagram of "no-where"), it has no real plot but is rather a description and discussion of the customs and institutions of Erewhon.
In this land moral failings are treated as mental illness and cured by a "straightener, " but physical illness and misfortune are considered crimes and severely punished.
In Life and Habit he returned to the question of evolution.
In Evolution Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck, or Cunning? (1887), he developed his ideas with an increasingly self-righteous resentment of what he conceived to be the Darwinians' deliberate concealment of the truth.
The account of a grimly repressive childhood is based on Butler's own youth.
During his later years Butler made prose translations of the Odyssey and Iliad, and he brought forth in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) the theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman.
His last important works were Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered (1899) and Erewhon Revisited (1901).
His autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh, was issued in 1903.
A sequel, Erewhon Revisited, was published in 1901.