The Way of All Flesh

By Samuel Butler

Book Overview

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375752498
• ISBN13: 9780375752490
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Modern Library
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.2" x 7.9"

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.

An indictment of Victorian society and Christianity

This is a book written ostensibly by a godfather, chronicling the family history and the unusual life of Earnest Pontifex, the only son of a very upright and religiously correct Christian minister. It is reportedly an almost autobiographical account of the author's own life and reflects his own lifetime revelations with regard to society, religion and morality. It goes extensively into the lives of his parents and their parents, allowing the reader to fully appreciate the inevitable life into which Ernest is born. The Way Of All Flesh explores the difficult struggles of a naiive young man coming to terms with his parents' and society's expectations of him while he endeavors to find his place in the world. His life begins as an avalanche of yesteryear--Victorian and Christian values are laid out, explored, tried, tested, examined and rejected as Earnest muddles his way to true happiness and a life worth living. If it were published during Samuel Butler's life, it would surely have resulted in some kind of social or legal censure as a shocking indictment of the establishment of the day. In many respects, it is still as revealing, shocking and valid as it was when it was written.