The Way of All Flesh - Samuel Butler Audiobook

Written by Samuel Butler
Read by Antony Ferguson
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc.
File size: 442642 KB
Release date: October 11, 2010
Duration: 15:22:10

“I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.” With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity.

Written between 1873 and 1884, it traces four generations of the Pontifex family. It represents a relaxation from the religious outlook from a Calvinistic approach, which is presented as harsh. Butler dared not publish it during his lifetime, but when it was published it was accepted as part of the general revulsion against Victorianism.

Published in 1903, a year after Butler’s death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth “in the bosom of a Christian family.” With irony, wit, and sometimes rancor, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside out the conventional novel of a family’s life through several generations.

The story covers four generations of the Pontifexes (so called for the parents’ habit of laying down the law). The central character is young Ernest – as Wilde sarcastically noted, the archetypal Victorian name. Bullied by his priggish father, Ernest becomes an Anglican clergyman, serving a religion he hates. He mistakes a decent young lady for a prostitute and vents 23 years of evangelical repression on her. He is sent to prison for sexual assault. It is ruin, but it is also liberation. On his release he is no longer respectable but can live his life in freedom, outside society. As, of course, did the lifelong iconoclast Samuel Butler

Butler is remembered as one of the greatest of the anti-Victorians, whose ideas reflected accurately the new, more liberal society that was to come following the death of England’s great Queen, and the beginning of a new era.

This is on every “must read” in your lifetime list.