Samuel Butler (1835-1902), the freethinking iconoclast whom George Bernard Shaw deemed "the greatest English
writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century, also satirized Victorian society in Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon
Revisited (1901). His work strongly influenced such writers as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce.
Summary
The Way of All Flesh is one of the time-bombs of literature," said V. S. Pritchett. "One thinks of
it lying in Samuel Butler's desk for thirty years, waiting to blow up the Victorian family and with it the whole
great pillared and balustraded edifice of the Victorian novel."
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."
"If the house caught on fire, the Victorian novel I would rescue from the flames would be The Way of All Flesh,"
wrote William Maxwell in The New Yorker. "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."