A Study Guide for Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535840422

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The Way of All Flesh

Samuel Butler

1903

Introduction

The Way of All Flesh is a novel written by Samuel Butler, a nineteenth-century British author known as an eccentric freethinker and iconoclast. His story about multiple generations of the Pontifex family is a caustic satire targeting what he saw as the suffocating values, pieties, enthusiasms, and hypocrisies of the Victorian age. In large part, the novel is a thinly veiled autobiography: Much of the Pontifex family's frustration, repression, and unhappiness reflect Butler's attitude toward his own family. Despite numerous setbacks, however, Butler's protagonist, Ernest Pontifex, is able to break away from his repressive upbringing and find fulfillment as a writer, much as Butler himself did.

Butler began writing the novel in 1873 and worked on it for more than a decade. He put the novel aside, however, out of reluctance to publish it as long as members of his family were still alive, for he did not want to alienate his family any more than he already had. As it happened, two of his sisters were still alive in 1903, the year after Butler's death, when his literary executor published the novel.

Butler is not generally regarded as among the top rank of Victorian novelists. The sole work on which his reputation rested during the late Victorian period was the satirical novel Erewhon. The Way of All Flesh, however, is now regarded as a masterpiece. The novel is available in numerous editions, including one published by Random House in 1998, and can also be found online at Project Gutenberg.

Author Biography

Butler was born on December 4, 1835, at Langar Rectory, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, England. His father, Thomas Butler, was an Anglican clergyman. He attended the Shrewsbury School, where his grandfather, also named Samuel Butler, had been headmaster for decades. Later, in 1858, Butler earned a degree in classics from St. John's College at Cambridge University. He intended to pursue a career in the ministry, but when he began to doubt his faith, he refused to take orders in the church. After quarreling about the matter with his disappointed father, he emigrated to New Zealand, where he became a sheep farmer. (Ironically, he was originally headed for western Canada, but his plans changed at the last moment; the ship on which he was first booked was lost at sea.) During this period he read On the Origin of Species (1859), the groundbreaking book on evolution written by Charles Darwin (who also attended Shrewsbury School), and for the next quarter century he was preoccupied with the clash between traditional religion and the new theories about evolution, which called into question the biblical account of Creation.

In 1864, Butler returned to England and, having long aspired to become a painter, took