Biography of Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler (December 4, 1835 - June 18, 1902) was a British writer best 
known for his satire Erewhon.

He was born in Langar Rectory, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, England, into a 
long line of clerics, preordained to a career in church in his father's wish 
and expectation. He went to Shrewsbury School, where his grandfather, Bishop 
of Lichfield and Coventry, had been headmaster before retiring. He then went 
up to his father's alma mater, St John's College, Cambridge, in 1854, 
collecting a First in Classics in 1858. Subsequently he lived in a poor parish 
in London during 1858 and 1859 as preparation for his ordination, where he 
discovered that baptisement 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 furor. As a result, he emigrated to New Zealand (a British colony 
since 1840) to put as much distance as possible between himself and his family. 
He wrote about his arrival and his life as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia 
Station in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863).

He returned to England in 1864, settling in rooms in Clifford's Inn (not far 
from Fleet Street), where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1872 his 
satirical novel Erewhon appeared anonymously, causing some speculation as to 
the identity of the author; when Butler revealed himself as the author, some 
expressed disappointment that none of the more famous personages speculated 
about had written it.

Erewhon made Butler a well-known figure, and he wrote a number of other 
books, including a not so 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 attack on Victorian 
hypocrisy too contentious.

Erewhon revealed Butler's long interest in Darwin's theories of biological 
evolution, though Butler spent a great deal of time criticising Darwin, 
not least because he believed that Charles had not sufficiently acknowledged 
his grandfather Erasmus Darwin's contribution to the origins of the theory.

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 and its nearby islands. He described the evidence for this theory in 
his The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) and in the introduction and footnotes 
to his prose translation of the Odyssey. Robert Graves elaborated on this 
hypothesis in his novel Homer's Daughter. Butler also translated the Iliad. 
His other works include Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered (1899), a theory 
that the Bard's sonnets, if rearranged, tell a story about a homosexual 
affair.

Samuel 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 now only available 
from antiquarian booksellers. Project Gutenberg [2] (http://www.gutenberg.net) 
hosts a shorter "Sketch" by Jones. More recently, Peter Raby has written a 
life: Samuel Butler: A Biography (Hogarth Press, 1991).

In the 1920s Jonathan Cape published Butler's collected works in twenty 
volumes as The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, but printed 
only 750 copies, making a complete set (if it can be found at all) unaffordable 
for the common reader. More easily available are the editions published by 
A.C. Fifield in 1908-1914. Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh remain in 
print as paperbacks.