Samuel Butler (novelist)
Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (published posthumously in 1903 with substantial revisions and published in its original form in 1964 as Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh). Both novels have remained in print since their initial publication. 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.[1][2]
This article is about the 19th-century novelist. For the 17th-century poet, author of Hudibras, see Samuel Butler (poet).
Samuel Butler
4 December 1835
Langar, Nottinghamshire, England
18 June 1902 (aged 66)
London, England
novelist, writer
Sexuality[edit]
Butler's sexuality has been the subject of academic speculation and debate.[15] Butler never married, although for years he made regular visits to a woman, Lucie Dumas. Herbert Sussman, having arrived at the conclusion that Butler was homosexual, opined that Butler's sexual association with Dumas was merely an outlet for his "intense same-sex desire". Sussman's theory calls Butler's assumption of "bachelorhood" merely a means to retain middle-class respectability in the absence of matrimony; he observes that there is no evidence of Butler's having any "genital contact with other men", but alleges that the "temptations of overstepping the line strained his close male relationships."[16]
His first significant male friendship was with the young Charles Pauli, son of a German businessman in London, whom Butler met in New Zealand. They returned to England together in 1864 and took neighbouring apartments in Clifford's Inn. Butler had made a large profit from the sale of his New Zealand farm and undertook to finance Pauli's study of law by paying him a regular sum, which Butler continued to do long after the friendship had cooled, until Butler had spent all his savings. On Pauli's death in 1892, Butler was shocked to learn that Pauli had benefited from similar arrangements with other men and had died wealthy, but without leaving Butler anything in his will.[17][18]
After 1878, Butler became close friends with Henry Festing Jones, whom Butler persuaded to give up his job as a solicitor to be Butler's personal literary assistant and travelling companion, at a salary of £200 a year. Although Jones kept his own lodgings at Barnard's Inn, the two men saw each other daily until Butler's death in 1902, collaborating on music and writing projects in the daytime, and attending concerts and theatres in the evenings; they also frequently toured Italy and other favourite parts of Europe together. After Butler's death, Jones edited Butler's notebooks for publication and published his own biography of him in 1919.[17]
Another friendship was with Hans Rudolf Faesch, a Swiss student who stayed with Butler and Jones in London for two years, improving his English, before departing for Singapore. Both Butler and Jones wept when they saw him off at the railway station in early 1895, and Butler subsequently wrote an emotional poem, "In Memoriam H. R. F.",[19] instructing his literary agent to offer it for publication to several leading English magazines. However, once the Oscar Wilde trial began in the spring of that year, with revelations of homosexual behaviour among the literati, Butler feared being associated with the widely reported scandal and in a panic wrote to all the magazines, withdrawing his poem.[17]
Some critics, beginning with Malcolm Muggeridge in The Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler (1936), concluded that Butler was a sublimated or repressed homosexual and that his lifelong status as an "incarnate bachelor" was comparable to that of his writer contemporaries Walter Pater, Henry James, and E. M. Forster, also thought to be closeted homosexuals.
Literary history and criticism[edit]
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 (especially the territory of Trapani) and its nearby islands. He described his evidence for this in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) and in the introduction and footnotes to his prose translation of the Odyssey (1900). Robert Graves elaborated on the hypothesis in his novel Homer's Daughter.
Butler argued in a lecture entitled "The Humour of Homer", delivered at The Working Men's College in London, 1892, that Homer's deities in the Iliad are like humans, but "without the virtue", and that he "must have desired his listeners not to take them seriously." Butler translated the Iliad (1898). His other works include Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered (1899), a theory that the sonnets, if rearranged, tell a story about a homosexual affair.
The English novelist Aldous Huxley acknowledged the influence of Erewhon on his novel Brave New World. Huxley's Utopian counterpart to Brave New World, Island, also refers prominently to Erewhon. In From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun asks, "Could a man do more to bewilder the public?"[20]
Assessment[edit]
Butler belonged to no literary school and spawned no followers in his lifetime. He was a serious but amateur student of the subjects he undertook, especially religious orthodoxy and evolutionary thought, and his controversial assertions effectively shut him out from both the opposing factions of church and science that played such a large role in late Victorian cultural life: "In those days one was either a religionist or a Darwinian, but he was neither."[5]
His influence on literature, such as it was, came through The Way of All Flesh, which Butler completed in the 1880s, but left unpublished to protect his family, yet the novel, "begun in 1870 and not touched after 1885, was so modern when it was published in 1903, that it may be said to have started a new school", particularly for its use of psychoanalysis in fiction, which "his treatment of Ernest Pontifex [the hero] foreshadows."[5]
Sue Zemka writes that "Among science fiction writers, The Book of the Machines has a canonical status, for it originates the conceit by which machines develop intelligent capacities and enslave mankind." For example, in Frank Herbert's Dune the "Butlerian Jihad" – "in-universe ancient revolt against 'thinking machines' that resulted in their prohibition" – is named after Butler.[21]
Biography and criticism[edit]
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 reissued by HardPress Publishing in 2013.[19] Project Gutenberg[39] hosts a shorter "Sketch" by Jones, first published in 1913 in The Humour of Homer and Other Essays and reissued in 1921 by Jonathan Cape as Samuel Butler: A Sketch. More recently, Peter Raby has written a life: Samuel Butler: A Biography (Hogarth Press, 1991).
The Way of All Flesh was published after Butler's death by his literary executor, R. A. Streatfeild, in 1903. This version, however, altered Butler's text in many ways and cut important material. The manuscript was edited by Daniel F. Howard as Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh (Butler's original title) and published for the first time in 1964.
