The Way of All Flesh

By Samuel Butler

Book Overview

Samuel Butleter began to write "The Way of All Flesh" about the year 1872, and was engaged upon it intermittently until 1884. It is therefore, to a great extent, contemporaneous with "Life and Habit,"... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B00K6M7BHW
• Release Date: January 1944
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Length: 429 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.

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.