The Way of All Flesh (World's Classics)

by SamuelButler (Author), Michael Mason (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $6.24

  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.

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $4.79

  'I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.' With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth 'in the bosom of a Christian family'. With irony, wit and sometimes rancour, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1995

  $4.70

  Samuel Butler was one of the Victorian era's greatest iconoclasts. Once, he said that after reading Darwin's The Origin of Species, that the theory of evolution had replaced Christianity for him. And this -- after Butler had originally studied for the clergy. Darwin also praised Butler for his clear understanding of Darwin's scientific work, as expressed in a series of popular articles contributed to the Canterbury Press. Butler's first literary success came in the form of the 1872 novel Erewhon, a work that was originally published anonymously, but which was an immediate popular and critical success in its satire of Victorian English mores and customs ( Erewhon is Nowhere spelled backward). After Erewhon, Butler began writing the first draft of The Way of All Flesh, but put it aside after realizing that the scathing, autobiographical nature of the story would deeply hurt other family members. The Way of All Flesh was eventually published in 1903. It tells the story of Ernest Pontifex, based upon Butler himself, and his struggles with Victorian mores, his restrictive, highly-religious family, and Victorian society itself. Butler is remembered as one of the greatest of the anti-Victorians, whose ideas reflected accurately the new, more liberal society that was to come following the death of England's great Queen, and the beginning of a new era.

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $15.05

  'I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.' With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth 'in the bosom of a Christian family'. With irony, wit and sometimes rancour, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations.