The Way of All Flesh

By Samuel Butler

Book Overview

The Way of All Flesh is often considered to be Samuel Butler's masterpiece, and is frequently included in many lists of best English-language novels of the 20th century. Despite this acclaim, Butler never published it in his lifetime-perhaps because the novel, a scathing, funny, and poignant satire of Victorian life, would have hit his contemporaries too close to home.The novel traces four generations of the Pontifex family, though the central character is Ernest Pontifex, the third-generation wayward son. The reader follows Ernest through the eyes of his watchful godfather, Mr. Overton, as he strikes out from home to find his way in life. His struggles along the way illustrate the complex relationships between a son and his family, and especially his father; all while satirizing Victorian ideas about family, church, marriage, and schooling.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GVGH2V3F
• ISBN13: 9791043139253
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Les Prairies Numeriques
• Length: 568 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An evening spent with Butler is an evening well-spent

A rich, intelligent, historically informative masterpiece that tells the modern reader about the concerns, delusions, pretensions and prejudices of Englishmen of the 1700s and 1800s. Much more than just a novel, this work offers Butler's opinions upon philosophy, child-rearing and religion. The events of the novel serve to illustrate and reinforce the points made. It is a hybrid, a novel/essay, and rare at that. More essayists should spice up their arguments by dressing them with vivid characters and a decent plot, as Butler has. Rich in wit, satire, sarcasm, humor, insight, and not without flashes of bitterness and anger. If you read only a hundred books in your lifetime, this would not be such a bad choice for the eightieth or eighty-first. Towers above most novels that cover this long period in history (some hundred years or so, spanning four or more generations).

'Twas A Great Way to Start the Twentieth Century

I won't pretend that this book is a quick page-turner, full of sparkle and a romp. In fact it gets bogged down rather too often in discussions about how ironically we conduct our lives and what would be the intelligent alternative. But it is a fine achievement nonetheless and a good cautionary tale about people taking themselves and their lives way too seriously. The depiction of family life reminded me of Satykov-Schedrin's "The Family Golovlyov," that savage recounting of the ultimate dysfunctional family: Some of Butler's exposing of each family member's real agenda is a supreme hoot, and very perceptive indeed. Please know too that "The Way of All Flesh," published in 1903, is an acknowledged precursor to much of our greatest Twentieth Century literature. George Bernard Shaw has admitted his debt, but I also wonder how James Joyce must have been affected, and many, many others. But for us, as we begin the Twenty-First Century, "The Way of All Flesh" is at least a delicious book to savor and to open our eyes.