The Heming Way

Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement," Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood satirizes Victorian hypocrisy in its chronicl

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 o

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Samuel Butler was among the most wide-ranging of the accomplished crew of late Victorian writers to which be belonged -- a forceful controversialist in the debates that s

William Bateson claimed at the Darwin Centenary in 1909 that Samuel Butler (1835–1902) was 'the most brilliant and by far the most interesting of Darwin's opponents, whose works are at length emerging from oblivion.' Best remembered today as the author of the novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, he also wrote on a range of subjects from translations of Homer to studies of evolutionary thought. In his Life and Habit (published in 1878) Butler contended that much of inheritance was based on habit making a feature ingrained, to the extent that it could pass between generations. However, he strongly contests Darwin's views on natural selection, and supports those of Lamarck – who he felt was unjustly overlooked in the scientific rush to acclaim Darwin – and of St George Mivart, whose On the Genesis of Species, published in 1871, was another blast against natural selection by a disenchanted Darwinist.

Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement," Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood satirizes Victorian hypocrisy in it

era hypocrisy as it traces four generations of the Pontifex family. It represents a relaxation from the harsh religious outlook of Calvinism. Butler dared not publish it during his lifetime, but when

The Way of All Flesh (1903) is a semi-autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler that attacks Victorian-era hypocrisy. Written between 1873 and 1884, it traces four generations of the Pontifex family. Bu

"The Way of All Flesh" is the best known of Victorian novels that thumbed its nose at Victorian novels. For this reason, it's frequently mentioned in talks of literary history, though it could also be

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler 'The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much