Samuel Butler (novelist)

Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was the iconoclastic English author of the Utopian satirical novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903. Both have remained in print ever since. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted today. He was also an artist.

This article is about the 19th-century novelist, author of Erewhon. For the 17th-century poet, author of Hudibras, see Samuel Butler (poet).

Samuel Butler
Born(1835-12-04)4 December 1835
Langar, Nottinghamshire, England
Died18 June 1902(1902-06-18) (aged 66)
London, England
Occupationnovelist, writer
NationalityEnglish
EducationShrewsbury School, St John’s, Cambridge

Early life
Samuel Butler's birthplace and childhood home

Butler was born on 4 December 1835[1] at the rectory in the village of Langar, Nottinghamshire, to the Rev. Thomas Butler, son of Dr. Samuel Butler, then headmaster of Shrewsbury School and later Bishop of Lichfield. Dr Butler was the son of a tradesman and descended from a line of yeomen, but his scholarly aptitude being recognised at a young age, he had been sent to Rugby and Cambridge, where he distinguished himself. His only son Thomas wished to go into the Navy, but succumbed to paternal pressure and entered the Church of England, in which he led an undistinguished career in contrast to his father's. Samuel's immediate family created for him an oppressive home environment (chronicled in The Way of All Flesh). Thomas Butler, states one critic, "to make up for having been a servile son, became a bullying father."[2]

Samuel Butler's relations with his parents, especially with his father, were largely antagonistic. His education began at home and included frequent beatings, as was not uncommon at the time. Samuel wrote later that his parents were "brutal and stupid by nature".[2] He later recorded that his father "never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollections I can call to mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him.... I have never passed a day without thinking of him many times over as the man who was sure to be against me."[2] Under his parents' influence, he was set on course to follow his father into the priesthood. He was sent to Shrewsbury at the age of twelve, where he did not enjoy the hard life under its then headmaster, Benjamin Hall Kennedy, whom he later drew as "Dr Skinner" in The Way of All Flesh.[3] Then in 1854 he went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a first in Classics in 1858.[4] (The graduate society of St John's is named the Samuel Butler Room (SBR) in his honour).

Career
Butler at the age of 23, 1858

After Cambridge he went to live in a low-income parish in London 1858–59 as preparation for his ordination into the Anglican clergy; there he discovered that baptism made no apparent difference to the morals and behaviour of his peers and began questioning his faith. This experience would later serve as inspiration for his work The Fair Haven. Correspondence with his father about the issue failed to set his mind at peace, inciting instead his father's wrath. As a result, he emigrated in September 1859, on the ship Roman Emperor[5] to New Zealand. Butler went there like many early British settlers of privileged origins, to put as much distance as possible between himself and his family. He wrote of his arrival and life as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), and made a handsome profit when he sold his farm, but the chief achievement of his time there was the drafts and source material for much of his masterpiece Erewhon.

Erewhon revealed Butler's long interest in Darwin's theories of biological evolution. In 1863, four years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the editor of a New Zealand newspaper, The Press, published a letter captioned "Darwin among the Machines." Written by Butler but signed Cellarius (q.v.,) it compares human evolution to machine evolution, prophesying that machines would eventually replace man in the supremacy of the earth: "In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race." [6] The letter raises many of the themes now debated by proponents of the technological singularity, i. e. that computers evolve much faster than humans and that we are racing towards an unknowable future through explosive technological change.

Butler also spent much time criticising Darwin, partly because Butler (himself a man living in the shadow of a previous Samuel Butler) believed that Darwin had not sufficiently acknowledged his grandfather Erasmus Darwin's contribution to the origins of his theory.[7]

Butler returned to England in 1864, settling in rooms in Clifford's Inn (near Fleet Street), where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1872, the Utopian novel Erewhon appeared anonymously, causing some speculation as to the identity of the author. When Butler revealed himself, Erewhon made him a well-known figure, more because of this speculation than for its literary merits, which have been undisputed.

In 1839 his grandfather Dr Butler had left Samuel property he owned at Whitehall in Shrewsbury on the condition that he survived his own father and his aunt, Dr Butler's daughter Harriet Lloyd. While at Cambridge in 1857 he sold the Whitehall mansion and six acres to his cousin Thomas Bucknall Lloyd, but kept the remaining land surrounding the mansion. His aunt died in 1880 and his father's death in 1886 resolved his financial problems for the last 16 years of his own life. The land at Whitehall was sold for housing development and he laid out and named four roads – Bishop and Canon Streets after his grandfather's and father's clerical titles, Clifford Street after his London home, and Alfred Street in gratitude to his clerk.[8]

Butler indulged himself, holidaying in Italy every summer and producing, while he was there, his works on the Italian landscape and art. His close interest in the art of the Sacri Monti is reflected in Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881) and Ex Voto (1888). He wrote a number of other books, including a less successful sequel, Erewhon Revisited. His semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh did not appear in print until after his death, as he considered its tone of satirical attack on Victorian morality too contentious at the time.

Butler died on 18 June 1902, aged 66, in a nursing home[9] in St John's Wood Road, London.[10] By his wish he was cremated at Woking Crematorium, and by differing accounts his ashes dispersed or buried in an unmarked grave.[9][10]

George Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster were great admirers of the later Samuel Butler, who brought a new tone into Victorian literature and began a long tradition of New Zealand utopian/dystopian literature that would culminate in works by Jack Ross, William Direen, Alan Marshall and Scott Hamilton.

Sexuality

Butler never married, and although he did for years make regular visits to a woman, Lucie Dumas, he also "had a predilection for intense male friendships, which is reflected in several of his works."[11]

His first significant male friendship was with the young Charles Pauli, son of a German businessman in London, whom Butler met in New Zealand; they returned to England together in 1864 and took neighbouring apartments in Clifford's Inn. Butler had made a large profit from the sale of his New Zealand farm, and undertook to finance Pauli's study of law by paying him a regular pension, which Butler continued to do long after the friendship had cooled, until Butler had spent all of his savings. Upon Pauli's death in 1892, Butler was shocked to learn that Pauli had benefited from similar arrangements with other men and had died wealthy, but without leaving Butler anything in his will.[11][12]

After 1878, Butler became close friends with Henry Festing Jones, whom Butler persuaded to give up his job as a solicitor to be Butler's personal literary assistant and travelling companion, at a salary of £200 a year. Although Jones kept his own lodgings at Barnard's Inn, the two men saw each other daily until Butler's death in 1902, collaborating on music and writing projects in the daytime, and attending concerts and theatres in the evenings; they also frequently toured Italy and other favourite parts of Europe together. After Butler's death, Jones edited Butler's notebooks for publication and published his own biography of Butler in 1919.[11]

Another significant friendship was with Hans Rudolf Faesch, a Swiss student who stayed with them in London for two years, improving his English, before departing for Singapore. Both Butler and Jones wept when they saw him off at the railway station in early 1895, and Butler subsequently wrote a very emotional poem, "In Memoriam H. R. F.",[13] instructing his literary agent to offer it for publication to several leading English magazines. However, once the Oscar Wilde trial began in the spring of that year, with revelations of homosexual behaviour among the literati, Butler feared being associated with the widely reported scandal and in a panic wrote to all the magazines, withdrawing his poem.[11] Tellingly, in his Memoir Jones describes this as a "Calamus poem"; both men would have been aware of Walt Whitman's homoerotic poems of the same name, as well as the very famous but less directly homoerotic In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson lamenting the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. Jones adds that Butler chose that title because "he had persuaded himself that we should never see Hans again."[13]

Beginning with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1937, a number of literary critics have discussed Butler's sublimated or repressed homosexuality, comparing his lifelong pose as an "incarnate bachelor" to the very similar bachelorhoods among his contemporaries of other writers assumed to be homosexual but closeted, such as Walter Pater, Henry James, and E. M. Forster. As Herbert Sussman speculates:[14]

There can be little doubt as to the intensity of Butler's same-sex desire, and the intensity with which he deployed the bachelor mode to regulate it. Victorian bachelorhood enabled a middle-class man who rejected matrimony to remain distinctly middle-class.... For Butler, as for Pater and James, the aim of bachelordom was to contain the homoerotic within the respectable.... With Pauli, and with Jones and Faesch, Butler most likely kept within the homosocial boundaries of his time. There is no evidence of genital contact with other men, although the temptations of overstepping the line strained his close male relationships.

Regarding the visits to Lucie Dumas (Jones was also a client of hers, and Butler paid for his visits), Sussman says, "Even the scheduled excursions into heterosexual sex functioned less to relieve the sexual tension of bachelorhood than to act out the intense same-sex desire for one's daily companions.... In characteristic Victorian fashion, then, these men... perform[ed] their sexual bond through the body of a woman."[14]

Literary history and criticism

Butler developed a theory that the Odyssey came from the pen of a young Sicilian woman, and that the scenes of the poem reflected the coast of Sicily (especially the territory of Trapani) and its nearby islands. He described his evidence for this theory in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) and in the introduction and footnotes to his prose translation of the Odyssey (1900). Robert Graves elaborated on this hypothesis in his novel Homer's Daughter. In a lecture entitled "The Humour of Homer", delivered at The Working Men's College in London, 1892, Butler argued that Homer's gods in the Iliad are like men but "without the virtue" and that the poet "must have desired his listeners not to take them seriously." Butler translated the Iliad (1898). His other works include Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered (1899), a theory that Shakespeare's sonnets, if rearranged, tell a story about a homosexual affair.

The English novelist Aldous Huxley acknowledged the influence of Erewhon on his novel Brave New World. Huxley's Utopian counterpart to Brave New World, Island, also prominently refers to Erewhon.

Jacques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence asks, "Could a man do more to bewilder the public?".[15]

Assessment

Butler belonged to no literary school, and spawned no followers during his lifetime. A serious but amateur student of the subjects he undertook, especially religious orthodoxy and evolutionary thought, his controversial assertions effectively shut him out from both of the opposing factions of church and science which played such a large role in late Victorian cultural life: "In those days one was either a religionist or a Darwinian, but he was neither."[2] His influence on literature, such as it was, came through The Way of All Flesh, which Butler completed in the 1880s but left unpublished to protect his family, yet the novel, "begun in 1870 and not touched after 1885, was so modern when it was published in 1903, that it may be said to have started a new school," particularly in the use of psychoanalytical modes of thought in fiction, which "his treatment of Ernest Pontifex [the hero] foreshadows."[2]

Philosophy and personal thought

Whether in his satire and fiction, his studies on the evidences of Christianity, his works on evolutionary thought or in his miscellaneous other writings, a consistent theme runs through Butler's work, stemming largely from his personal struggle with the stifling of his own nature by his parents, which led him on to seek more general principles of growth, development and purpose: "What concerned him was to establish his nature, his aspirations and their fulfillment upon a philosophic basis, to identify them with the nature, the aspirations, the fulfillment of all humanity – and more than that – with the fulfillment of the universe.... His struggle became generalized, symbolic, tremendous."[2] The form that this search took was principally philosophical and – given the interests of the day – biological: "Satirist, novelist, artist and critic that he was, he was primarily a philosopher," and in particular a philosopher who looked for the biological foundations for his work: "His biology was a bridge to a philosophy of life which sought a scientific basis for religion and endowed a naturalistically conceived universe with a soul."[2] Indeed, "philosophical writer" was ultimately the self-description Butler chose as most fitting to his work.[16]

Theology

In a collection of essays published after his death entitled God the Known and God the Unknown, Samuel Butler argued for the existence of a single, corporeal God and argued that belief in an incorporeal deity was essentially the same thing as atheism. He asserted that this "body" of God was, in fact, composed of the bodies of all living things on earth, a belief which may be classed as "panzoism". He later changed his views and decided that God was composed not only of all living things but all non-living things as well. He argued, however, that "...some vaster Person [may] loom... out behind our God, and... stand in relation to him as he to us. And behind this vaster and more unknown God there may be yet another, and another, and another."[17]

Heredity

Samuel Butler argued that each organism was not, in fact, distinct from its parents. Instead, he asserted that each being was actually merely an extension of its parents at a later stage of evolution. "Birth," he once quipped, "has been made too much of."[18]

Evolution

Butler accepted evolution but rejected Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.[19] In his book Evolution, Old and New (1879) he accused Darwin of borrowing heavily from Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, whilst playing down these influences and giving them little credit.[19][20][21] In 1912, biologist Vernon Kellogg described Butler's views as follows:

Butler, though strongly anti-Darwinian (that is, anti-natural selection and anti-Charles Darwin) is not anti-evolutionist. He professes, indeed, to be very much of an evolutionist, and in particular one who has taken it upon his shoulders to reinstate Buffon and Erasmus Darwin, and, as a follower of these two, Lamarck, in their rightful place as the most believable explainers of the factors and method of evolution. His evolution belief is a sort of Butlerized Lamarckism, tracing back originally to Buffon and Erasmus Darwin.[22]

Historian Peter J. Bowler has described Butler as a defender of neo-Lamarckian evolution. Bowler noted that "Butler began to see in Lamarckism the prospect of retaining an indirect form of the design argument. Instead of creating from without, God might exist within the process of living development, represented by its innate creativity."[20][23]

Butler's writings on evolution were criticized by scientists.[24][25] Critics have pointed out that Butler admitted to be writing entertainment rather than science and his writings were not taken seriously by most professional biologists.[26][27] Butler's books were negatively reviewed in Nature by George Romanes and Alfred Russel Wallace. Romanes stated that Butler's views on evolution had no basis from science.[28][29]

Gregory Bateson often mentioned Butler and saw value in some his ideas, calling him "the ablest contemporary critic of Darwinian evolution". He noted Butler's insight into the efficiencies of habit formation (patterns of behaviour and mental processes) in adapting to an environment:

...mind and pattern as the explanatory principles which, above all, required investigation were pushed out of biological thinking in the later evolutionary theories which were developed in the mid-nineteenth century by Darwin, Huxley, etc. There were still some naughty boys, like Samuel Butler, who said that mind could not be ignored in this way—but they were weak voices, and incidentally, they never looked at organisms. I don’t think Butler ever looked at anything except his own cat, but he still knew more about evolution than some of the more conventional thinkers.[30]

Biography and criticism

Butler's friend Henry Festing Jones wrote the authoritative biography: the two-volume Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835–1902): A Memoir (commonly known as Jones's Memoir), published in 1919 and reissued by HardPress Publishing in 2013. Project Gutenberg[31] hosts a shorter "Sketch" by Jones. More recently, Peter Raby has written a life: Samuel Butler: A Biography (Hogarth Press, 1991). The Way of All Flesh was published after Butler's death by his literary executor, R. Streatfeild, in 1903. This version however altered Butler's text in many ways and cut important material. The actual manuscript was edited by Daniel F. Howard as Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh (Butler's original title) and published for the first time in 1965. For a critical study, mostly about The Way of All Flesh, see Thomas L. Jeffers, Samuel Butler Revalued (University Park: Penn State Press, 1981).

Main works
  • Darwin among the Machines (1863, largely incorporated into Erewhon)[32]
  • Lucubratio Ebria (1865) [32]
  • Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872)
  • Life and Habit (1878). Trubner (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 978-1-108-00551-7)
  • Evolution, Old and New; Or, the theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as compared with that of Charles Darwin (1879)
  • Unconscious Memory (1880)
  • Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881)
  • Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification? (1887)
  • Ex Voto; An Account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at Verallo-Sesia (1888)
  • The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897)
  • The Iliad of Homer, Rendered into English Prose (1898)
  • Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered (1899)
  • The Odyssey of Homer (1900)
  • Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later: Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His Son (1901)
  • The Way of All Flesh (1903, also entitled Ernest Pontifex; or, The Way of All Flesh)
  • God the Known and God the Unknown (1909)
  • The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
  • The Fair Haven (1913, considers inconsistencies between the Gospels)
  • A First Year in Canterbury Settlement With Other Early Essays (1914)
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References
  1. Robinson, Roger. "Butler, Samuel – Biography". Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Retrieved 2 October 2012.
  2. [https://www.questia.com/library/57465/samuel-butler-a-mid-victorian-modern Clara G. Stillman, Samuel Butler, a Mid-Victorian Modern Retrieved 11 May 2020.
  3. Dickins, Gordon (1987). An Illustrated Literary Guide to Shropshire. Shropshire Libraries. p. 14. ISBN 0-903802-37-6.
  4. "Butler, Samuel (BTLR854S)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  5. Lyttelton Times 28 January 1860
  6. "Darwin among the Machines" is reprinted in the Notebooks of Samuel Butler on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6173
  7. "Evolution, Old & New Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, as compared with that of Charles Darwin", reprinted in the Notebooks on Project Gutenberg
  8. Trinder, Barrie (editor) (1984). Victorian Shrewsbury, Studied in the History of a County Town. Shropshire Libraries. p. 118. ISBN 0-903802-30-9.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)Chapter 10 – Cherry Orchard, the growth of a Victorian suburb.
  9. Lee, Sir Sidney (editor) (1912). Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, Volume I. Smith, Elder & Co.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)Article by "E. M. L." (Colonel E. M. Lloyd).
  10. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 8. Oxford University Press. 2004. p. 216. ISBN 0-19-861359-8.Article by Elinor Shaffer.
  11. Geddis, Catherine. "Butler, Samuel." Archived 14 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, glbtq.com, 21 July 2006, accessed 8 May 2012.
  12. Robinson, J. Z. "Samuel Butler." Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II, Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, eds. New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 90–91.
  13. Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835–1902): A Memoir. London: Macmillan, 1920.
  14. Sussman, Herbert. "Samuel Butler as Late-Victorian Bachelor: Regulating and Representing the Homoerotic." Samuel Butler: Victorian against the Grain, a Critical Overview. Ed. James G. Paradis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
  15. Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence. Harper Collins, 2000, p. 635.
  16. Morpurgo, Horatio (May 2006). "Samuel Butler, or Sociobiology for Grown-Ups". Three Monkeys Online. Retrieved 20 May 2009.
  17. Gouge, T.A. (1967). "Butler, Samuel". The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 1. New York City, New York: The MacMillan Company & The Free Press. p. 435.
  18. Gouge, T. A. (1967). "Butler, Samuel". The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 1. New York City, New York: The MacMillan Company & The Free Press. p. 435.
  19. Mark A. Bedau, Carol E. Cleland. (2010). The Nature of Life: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives from Philosophy and Science. Cambridge University Press. p. 344-345
  20. Peter J. Bowler (2003), Evolution: The History of an Idea. University of California Press. p. 259. ISBN 0-520-23693-9.
  21. C. Leon Harris (1981), Evolution: Genesis and Revelations: With Readings from Empedocles to Wilson. State University of New York Press. p. 279. ISBN 0-87395-487-4
  22. Vernon L. Kellogg (1912), "Samuel Butler and Biological Memory", Science. New Series, Vol. 35, No. 907. pp. 769–771.
  23. Peter J. Bowler (2001), Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain. University of Chicago Press. p. 142. ISBN 0-226-06858-7
  24. Pauly, Philip J. (1982). Samuel Butler and His Darwinian Critics. Victorian Studies. Vol. 25, No. 2. pp. 161-180.
  25. Holt, Lee Elbert. (1989). Samuel Butler. Twayne Publishers. p. 44
  26. Simpson, George Gaylord. (1961). Lamarck, Darwin and Butler: Three Approaches to Evolution. The American Scholar. Vol. 30, No. 2. pp. 238-249.
  27. Peter J. Bowler (1983). The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolutionary Theories in the Decades Around 1900. Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 72. ISBN 0-8018-2932-1
  28. Wallace, Alfred Russel. (1879). Evolution, Old and New. Nature 20, pp. 141–144.
  29. G. J. Romanes (1881), Unconscious Memory. Nature 23, pp. 285–287.
  30. Gregory Bateson, Form, Substance and Difference. General Semantics Bulletin, No. 37 (1970) Reprinted in the anthology Steps to an Ecology of Mind - University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-03905-6
  31. Main Page – Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.net
  32. Basil Willey – Samuel Butler: English author [1835-1902] Britannica [Retrieved 2016-06-13]

Further reading
  • Grendon, Felix. (1918). Samuel Butler's God. North American Review. Vol. 208, No. 753. pp. 277–286.
  • Holt, Lee Elbert. (1941). Samuel Butler and His Victorian Critics. ELH. Vol. 8, No. 2. pp. 146–159.
  • Paradis, James G. (2007). Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain: A Critical Overview. University of Toronto Press.
  • Raby, Peter. (1991). Samuel Butler: A Biography. University of Iowa Press.
  • Rattray, Robert F. (1914). The Philosophy of Samuel Butler. Mind. Vol. 23, No. 91. pp. 371–385.
  • Simpson, George Gaylord. (1961). Lamarck, Darwin and Butler: Three Approaches to Evolution. The American Scholar. Vol. 30, No. 2. pp. 238–249.
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Samuel Butler (novelist)
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