Samuel Butler's Erewhon Revisited is a satirical sequel to his highly successful Erewhon. Mr. Higgs meets many unpleasant accidents and surprises in Butler's utopian nation. A new religion has come into existence as a result of distorted and misunderstood sayings, and corruption has taken over society. Butler's satire touches on subjects ranging from Darwin's theories of biological evolution to the intelligence of machines.
Samuel Butler's Erewhon Revisited is a satirical sequel to his highly successful Erewhon. Mr. Higgs meets many unpleasant accidents and surprises in Butler's utopian nation. A new religion has come into existence as a result of distorted and misunderstood sayings, and corruption has taken over society. Butler's satire touches on subjects ranging from Darwin's theories of biological evolution to the intelligence of machines.
The story is narrated by Overton, godfather to the central character. The novel takes its beginnings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to trace Ernest's emergence from previous generations of the Pontifex family. John Pontifex was a carpenter; his son George rises in the world to become a publisher; George's son Theobald, pressed by his father to become a minister, is manipulated into marrying Christina, the daughter of a clergyman; the main character Ernest Pontifex is the eldest son of Theobald and Christina. The author depicts an antagonistic relationship between Ernest and his hypocritical and domineering parents. His aunt Alethea is aware of this relationship, but dies before she can fulfill her aim of counteracting the parents' malign influence on the boy. However, shortly before her death she secretly passes a small fortune into Overton's keeping, with the agreement that once Ernest is twenty-eight, he can receive it. As Ernest develops into a young man, he travels a bumpy theological road, reflecting the divisions and controversies in the Church of England in the Victorian era. Easily influenced by others at university, he starts out as an Evangelical Christian, and soon becomes a clergyman. He then falls for the lures of the High Church (and is duped out of much of his own money by a fellow clergyman). He decides that the way to regenerate the Church of England is to live among the poor, but the results are, first, that his faith in the integrity of the Bible is severely damaged by a conversation with one of the poor he was hoping to redeem, and, second, that under the pressures of poverty and theological doubt, he attempts a sexual assault on a woman he has incorrectly believed to be of loose morals.
Erewhon or Over the Range by Samuel Butler. Erewhon: or, Over the Range is a novel by Samuel Butler which was first published anonymously in 1872. The title is also the name of a country, supposedly discovered by the protagonist. The first part of "Erewhon" written was an article headed "Darwin among the Machines," and signed Cellarius. It was written in the Upper Rangitata district of the Canterbury Province (as it then was) of New Zealand, and appeared at Christchurch in the Press Newspaper, June 13, 1863. A copy of this article is indexed under my books in the British Museum catalogue. In passing, I may say that the opening chapters of "Erewhon" were also drawn from the Upper Rangitata district, with such modifications as I found convenient. A second article on the same subject as the one just referred to appeared in the Press shortly after the first, but I have no copy. It treated Machines from a different point of view, and was the basis of pp. 270-274 of the present edition of "Erewhon." This view ultimately led me to the theory I put forward in "Life and Habit," published in November 1877. I have put a bare outline of this theory (which I believe to be quite sound) into the mouth of an Erewhonian philosopher in Chapter XXVII. of this book.
Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 - 18 June 1902) was the iconoclastic English author of the Utopian satirical novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903. Both have remained in print ever since. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted today. He was also an artist.
Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 - 18 June 1902) was the iconoclastic English author of the Utopian satirical novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903. Both have remained in print ever since. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted today. He was also an artist.
Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 - 18 June 1902) was the iconoclastic English author of the Utopian satirical novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903. Both have remained in print ever since. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted today. He was also an artist.
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) made one reputation during his lifetime with his Utopian satire Erewhon, and a second reputation after his death with The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously. This novel, the story of Ernest Pontifex, is a thinly disguised autobiography in which Butler brutally but hilariously savages the financial, sexual, familial and spiritual hypocrisies of late Victorian England.
Samuel Butler's most critically acclaimed novel, Erewhon, or, Over the Range, is set in the fictional country of Erewhon, an anagram of "nowhere." Butler crafts a mesmerizing narrative centered around a protagonist's journey through this seemingly utopian society. Initially, Erewhon appears idyllic-a place where money holds prestige but lacks purchasing power and nature is unspoiled by machines, which are banned due to their perceived threat to survival. Yet, the protagonist soon uncovers layers of religious insincerity and institutional flaws that shatter the illusion of perfection. In this topsy-turvy world, disease is a cause for imprisonment and crime is treated as an illness. Erewhon is frequently compared to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in its satirical send-up of hypocritical society, but Butler goes further and does something altogether original in anticipating DNA testing and artificial intelligence-making Erewhon a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction. In addition to George Bernard Shaw, who is widely considered his chief disciple, Butler influenced and inspired other writers, including Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, H. G. Wells, and Dorothy Richardson.This volume reproduces the expanded and definitive edition of Erewhon issued in 1901. It also contains the full text of Butler's article "Darwin among the Machines," which provided the basis for his eerily prescient chapters on machine learning and consciousness, as well as a detailed biographical timeline.
