Product Description

(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 surrounded Darwin's theory of evolution, a painter who sometimes exhibited at the Royal Academy, an idiosyncratic critic and a gifted travel writer, and even, in his early years, a highly successful sheep farmer in New Zealand. He was also, as The Way of All Flesh, his deterministic tale of the havoc wrought by genetic inheritance, suggests, one of the great British masters of the novel of ideas.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1385370 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

Ingram
"One of the time bombs of all literature" (V.S. Pritchett). Written in the 1880s and not published until 1903 after Butler's death, the semi-autobiographical story of the Pontifex family savages the bourgeois Victorian family and its values.

From the Publisher
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From the Back Cover
Reared on piety, repression and emotional blackmail, Ernest Pontifex follows the course prescribed for him towards Holy Orders. Yet rebellion at Cambridge, unwise theology, unwiser financial dealings, and finally prison free him from his parents' tyranny. Left with his health and career ruined, Ernest faces still more trials before fortune and his godfather rescue him from the brink. This savagely funny, iconoclastic odyssey from joyless duty to unbridled liberalism exposes the hypocrisy of nineteenth century family life.