The Way of All FleshSelected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time 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." |
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able Æschylus Alethea Allaby Aristophanes asked aunt Battersby began believe better called Cambridge Carlo Dolci CHAPTER Charlotte Church Church of England clergyman course dear doubt Ellen Ernest felt Ernest never Euripides eyes face father and mother feel fond friends gave give gone half hand happy heard heart hope Joey Jupp knew leave less live look Lord Lycurgue marriage married Master Ernest matter mind Miss Pontifex months morning never once Paleham papa and mamma perhaps poor portmanteau prison Pryer Rechab Rectory remember Roughborough Samuel Butler seemed seen shillings Simeonites sister Skinner soon spiritual Struldbrugs sunset tree suppose sure taken talk tell Theobald and Christina things thought told took Towneley turned wanted week whole wife wish woman words write young