The Way of All Flesh Paperback - 1998
by Samuel Butler
"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.
About this book
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler is a semi-autobiographical novel that attacks Victorian-era hypocrisy. The story traces the history of the Pontifex family from the early eighteenth century until about 1880 and focuses, for the most part, on the life of young Ernest Pontifex, the novel’s protagonist. Yet Ernest isn’t born until 1835, in the book’s 17th chapter. Butler uses the first 16 chapters to provide a psychological portrait of the Pontifex family background as a means of allowing readers to understand what factors have gone into forming Ernest’s personality and the longevity of the chains of tradition he must break.
Upon publication in 1903, the book seemed very much of its time, an early 20th century groundbreaker alongside the work of Sigmund Freud and Pablo Picasso. The Way of All Flesh seemed to celebrate the end of the Victorian age just as it was decidedly over. But in fact, Butler had written the book decades earlier, between 1873 and 1884, though he deemed it too shocking for publication during his lifetime. As a result, Richard Alexander Streatfeild, a friend of Butler’s, arranged the publication — as the author requested of him — a year after his death. Streatfeild proved to be a good friend indeed as The Way of All Flesh was ranked twelfth on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
From the jacket flap
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."
First Edition Identification
Grant Richards first published The Way of All Flesh in London in 1903. First editions are bound in dark red cloth with gilt-lettered titling on the spine and front cover. They also include a prefatory note by Streatfeild, who edited the book.
Details
- Title The Way of All Flesh
- Author Samuel Butler
- Binding Paperback
- Edition New edition
- Pages 448
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Modern Library, New York, New York, U.S.A.
- Date 1998-09-14
- ISBN 9780375752490 / 0375752498
- Weight 1.1 lbs (0.50 kg)
- Dimensions 7.9 x 5.2 x 1 in (20.07 x 13.21 x 2.54 cm)
- Reading level 1340
-
Themes
- Chronological Period: 19th Century
- Cultural Region: British
- Library of Congress subjects Domestic fiction, England
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 98021241
- Dewey Decimal Code FIC
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