Samuel Butler (novelist)
In 1863, a newspaper called The Press printed a letter signed only with the pen name Cellarius. The author was Samuel Butler, an English novelist and critic, and the letter was titled "Darwin among the Machines". It appeared four years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Butler compared the evolution of humans with the evolution of machines. He predicted that machines would eventually replace people as the masters of the earth, and he wrote: "In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race".
Several themes from today's debates about the technological singularity appear in that letter. Butler suggested that computers evolve far faster than humans do. He also suggested that we are racing toward an unknowable future through explosive technological change.
Butler lived from 1835 to 1902, and he wrote about everything from sheep farming to Homer. Few of his interests fit neatly together. Why did a man so far ahead on machines spend his life as an outsider to both church and science? What drove him from a clergyman's home to the far side of the world? And why did he hold back his most personal novel for as long as he lived?
The rectory in the village of Langar, Nottinghamshire, is where Samuel Butler was born on the 4th of December 1835. His father was the Reverend Thomas Butler. Thomas's own father, another Dr. Samuel Butler, was then headmaster of Shrewsbury School and later became Bishop of Lichfield. That grandfather was the son of a tradesman and came from a line of yeomen. Even so, his scholarly gifts were noticed young, and he was sent to Rugby and then Cambridge, where he did well.
Thomas, the bishop's only son, had set his heart on joining the Navy. Pressure from his own father pushed him into the Anglican clergy instead, where his career was undistinguished beside the bishop's. A biographer of Samuel Butler observed that Thomas, "to make up for having been a servile son... became a bullying father."
At home, Butler's first lessons came with frequent beatings, which was not unusual at the time. Later in life he called his parents "brutal and stupid by nature". Of his father he wrote that he "never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollections I can call to mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him." He added that he never passed a day without thinking many times of his father as the man who was sure to be against him. Under his parents' influence, he was set on course to follow his father into the priesthood.
At the age of twelve he was sent to Shrewsbury, where he disliked the hard life. Its headmaster, Benjamin Hall Kennedy, later appears in The Way of All Flesh as "Dr. Skinner". That novel also chronicles the oppressive atmosphere of Butler's own home. In 1854 Butler went up to St John's College, Cambridge, and in 1858 he took a first in Classics. The college's graduate society, the Samuel Butler Room or SBR, still carries his name.
Ordination was the next step on his father's path, and Butler prepared for it among the poor of London.
Infant baptism, Butler noticed, made no visible difference to the morals or behaviour of his peers in the low-income London parish where he spent 1858 and 1859. The observation started him questioning his faith. Letters to his father about it did not settle his mind. They only provoked his father's wrath.
In September 1859, Butler sailed for New Zealand on the ship Roman Emperor. Like many privileged young British settlers, he wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and his family. He became a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station and later described the experience in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, published in 1863. When he sold the farm he made a handsome profit. His chief achievement there, however, was the drafts and source material for much of Erewhon.
Much of the Cellarius letter was later absorbed into that same book. Butler returned to England in 1864 and took rooms at Clifford's Inn, near Fleet Street. He lived there for the rest of his life.
Erewhon, or Over the Range, appeared in 1872 with no author's name on it. Readers speculated about who had written this utopian novel. When Butler admitted it was his, the book made him famous, more because of the guessing than because of its literary merits, which no one disputes. It has remained in print ever since. He later published a less successful sequel, Erewhon Revisited.
His investments in the same years proved far less rewarding than his fiction.
The sum of £2,000 was all that remained of Butler's own capital after the Canada Tanning Extract Company collapsed. He had lost money investing in a Canadian steamship company and in that firm, where he and his friend Charles Pauli were made nominal directors. In 1874 Butler crossed to Canada, "fighting fraud of every kind" in a bid to save the business. The effort failed.
Property at Whitehall, in Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, tells a different story. In 1839 his grandfather left him the estate, on condition that Samuel outlive both his own father and his aunt, Harriet Lloyd, the grandfather's daughter. While at Cambridge in 1857, Butler sold the mansion and six acres to his cousin Thomas Bucknall Lloyd, but he kept the land around it.
In the 1870s, Shrewsbury School, his old school, proposed to move to the Whitehall site. Butler opposed the plan in public, and the school ultimately moved elsewhere.
His aunt died in 1880 and his father in 1886. Those deaths ended his financial problems for the last 16 years of his life. The Whitehall land was then sold for housing, and Butler laid out and named four roads. Bishop Street and Canon Street recalled the clerical titles of his grandfather and father. Clifford Street recalled his London home. Alfred Street was named in gratitude to his clerk.
Lucie Dumas is the one woman named in the story of Butler's private life. He never married, though for years he made regular visits to her. Scholars have debated his sexuality ever since. Herbert Sussman concluded that Butler was homosexual and argued that the visits to Dumas were merely an outlet for his "intense same-sex desire". Sussman also saw Butler's chosen bachelorhood as a way to keep middle-class respectability. He notes there is no evidence of Butler having any "genital contact with other men".
Charles Pauli, the young son of a German businessman in London, was Butler's first significant male friendship. The two met in New Zealand, sailed home together, and took neighbouring apartments. Butler paid Pauli a regular sum to study law. He kept paying long after the friendship cooled, until his savings were gone. When Pauli died in 1892, Butler was shocked to learn that other men had supported Pauli in the same way. Pauli had died wealthy and left Butler nothing in his will.
After 1878, Butler grew close to Henry Festing Jones. He persuaded Jones to give up work as a solicitor and become his literary assistant and travelling companion, at a salary of £200 a year. Jones kept his own lodgings at Barnard's Inn, yet the two men met daily until Butler died. Days went to music and writing projects, and evenings to concerts and the theatre. They also toured Italy and other favourite parts of Europe together.
Hans Rudolf Faesch, a Swiss student, lived with Butler and Jones in London for two years to improve his English. Then he left for Singapore. In early 1895, both older men wept as they saw him off at the railway station. Butler wrote an emotional poem, "In Memoriam H. R. F.", and told his literary agent to offer it to several leading English magazines. Then the Oscar Wilde trial began in the spring, with its revelations of homosexual behaviour among the literati. Butler feared being linked to the scandal and, in a panic, wrote to every magazine to withdraw the poem.
Malcolm Muggeridge, in The Earnest Atheist (1936), concluded that Butler was a sublimated or repressed homosexual. He compared Butler's lifelong state as an "incarnate bachelor" to that of Walter Pater, Henry James and E. M. Forster.
"Philosophical writer" was the description Butler himself judged most fitting for his work. One theme ran through his satire, his fiction and his studies of Christianity and evolution. It grew from his struggle against the stifling of his own nature by his parents, and it pushed him to seek general principles of growth, development and purpose. Because the age was fascinated by biology, his search took a biological form.
Four books carried his case on evolution: Life and Habit; Evolution, Old and New; Unconscious Memory; and Luck, or Cunning, As the Main Means of Organic Modification? Butler accepted evolution but rejected Darwin's theory of natural selection, and his objection was not a religious one. In Evolution, Old and New, published in 1879, he accused Darwin of borrowing heavily from Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck while playing down their influence.
Erasmus Darwin was Charles Darwin's own grandfather, and Butler believed Darwin had not credited him enough. Butler, too, was the grandson of a distinguished man, and he had written that man's biography. In the last years of Darwin's life, the two argued fiercely over the text of Darwin's biography of Erasmus. The quarrel ended in complete personal estrangement.
In 1912 the biologist Vernon Kellogg summed up Butler's position. Kellogg wrote that Butler was strongly anti-Darwinian but not anti-evolutionist, and he called the result "Butlerized Lamarckism". The historian Peter J. Bowler described Butler as a defender of neo-Lamarckian evolution. Bowler argued that Lamarckism let Butler keep an indirect form of the design argument, with God existing inside the process of living development.
Scientists were unkind. George Romanes and Alfred Russel Wallace both reviewed Butler's books negatively in Nature, and Romanes said his views on evolution had no basis in science. Critics also noted that Butler admitted to writing entertainment rather than science.
Gregory Bateson took a warmer view. He called Butler "the ablest contemporary critic of Darwinian evolution" and valued his insight into how habits help living things adapt. Bateson also joked that Butler never looked at anything except his own cat.
"Birth," Butler once quipped, "has been made too much of." He argued that no organism is truly distinct from its parents. Each being, he said, is merely an extension of its parents at a later stage of evolution.
God the Known and God the Unknown, a book of essays published after his death, carried the same logic into theology. The essays first appeared as articles in The Examiner in May, June and July of 1879. Butler argued for a single corporeal deity and declared that belief in an incorporeal one is essentially atheism. At first he said God's body was made of the bodies of all living things, a view that may be called panzoism. Later he decided it also included non-living things. He allowed that "some vaster Person may loom... out behind our God", with perhaps another behind that one, and another beyond.
His book The Fair Haven, issued in 1873 under the name John Pickard Owen, had already turned to the Gospels. It considers the inconsistencies between them.
Every summer Butler holidayed in Italy, and there he produced his works on the Italian landscape and art. His close interest in the art of the Sacri Monti shows in Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino, published in 1881, and in Ex Voto, published in 1888.
In 1897 Butler published The Authoress of the Odyssey, arguing that the poem came from the pen of a young Sicilian woman. He believed its scenes reflected the coast of Sicily, especially the territory of Trapani, and its nearby islands. He repeated his evidence in the introduction and footnotes to his prose translation of the Odyssey in 1900. Robert Graves later elaborated on the hypothesis in his novel Homer's Daughter.
At The Working Men's College in London in 1892, Butler delivered a lecture titled "The Humour of Homer". He argued that Homer's gods in the Iliad are like humans but "without the virtue". Homer, he said, "must have desired his listeners not to take them seriously." His prose Iliad followed in 1898. A year later came Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered, which argued that the sonnets, if rearranged, tell the story of a homosexual affair.
In The Way of All Flesh, the hero Ernest Pontifex says he spent his life trying to like modern music and succeeded less as he aged. Asked when modern music began, he answers, "with Sebastian Bach". Butler shared the taste. He liked only Handel, and in a letter to Miss Savage he wrote, "I only want Handel's Oratorios."
With Henry Festing Jones, Butler composed choral works that Eric Blom called "imitation Handel", though they carried satirical texts. Two of their joint works were the cantatas Narcissus and Ulysses, both for solo voices, chorus and orchestra. Narcissus had a private rehearsal in 1886 and was published in 1888. Ulysses came out after Butler's death, in 1904. George Bernard Shaw wrote in a private letter that the music showed "a ridiculously complete command of the Handelian manner and technique."
Around 1871 The Drawing Room Gazette engaged Butler as its music critic. From 1890 he took counterpoint lessons with W. S. Rockstro.
On the 18th of June 1902, Butler died at the age of 66 in a nursing home in St. John's Wood Road, London. At his wish he was cremated at Woking Crematorium. Accounts differ on whether his ashes were dispersed or buried in an unmarked grave.
The Way of All Flesh had been begun in 1870 and left untouched after 1885. Butler judged its satirical attack on Victorian morality too contentious for his lifetime, and he held it back to protect his family. His literary executor, R. A. Streatfeild, published it in 1903, but that version altered Butler's text in many ways and cut important material. Daniel F. Howard edited the original manuscript, and in 1964 it appeared for the first time as Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh, Butler's own title.
Butler belonged to no literary school and spawned no followers in his lifetime. He was a serious but amateur student of religious orthodoxy and evolutionary thought, and his controversial claims shut him out from both church and science. One line sums up his position: "In those days one was either a religionist or a Darwinian, but he was neither." Yet one admirer argued that the posthumous novel was so modern in 1903 that it started a new school, foreshadowing the use of psychoanalysis in fiction through its treatment of Ernest Pontifex.
The scholar Sue Zemka writes that among science fiction writers "The Book of the Machines" has a canonical status. She says it originates the idea of machines developing intelligence and enslaving mankind. In Frank Herbert's Dune, the Butlerian Jihad, an ancient revolt against thinking machines that led to their prohibition, is named after Butler. Aldous Huxley acknowledged the influence of Erewhon on Brave New World, and his later utopia Island refers to Erewhon prominently.
Henry Festing Jones wrote the authoritative biography. His two-volume memoir, Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835-1902), appeared in 1919, and he had also edited Butler's notebooks for publication. The most recent biography is Peter Raby's, published in 1991. In From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun asked of Butler: "Could a man do more to bewilder the public?"
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Common questions
Who was Samuel Butler, the English novelist?
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon and the semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh. He also wrote on Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought and Italian art, and he translated Homer into prose.
What is Samuel Butler's Erewhon about and when was it published?
Erewhon, or Over the Range, is a utopian novel that Samuel Butler published anonymously in 1872. Readers speculated about its author, and when Butler revealed himself the book made him a well-known figure.
What did Samuel Butler write in Darwin among the Machines?
Darwin among the Machines was a letter Samuel Butler published in The Press in 1863 under the pen name Cellarius. It compared human evolution with machine evolution and predicted that machines would replace humans as masters of the earth.
Why did Samuel Butler reject Darwin's theory of natural selection?
Samuel Butler accepted evolution but rejected natural selection, and his objection was not religious. In Evolution, Old and New (1879), he accused Charles Darwin of borrowing heavily from Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck while giving them little credit.
Why was Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh published after his death?
Samuel Butler held back The Way of All Flesh because he thought its satirical attack on Victorian morality was too contentious. His literary executor, R. A. Streatfeild, published an altered version in 1903, and the original text appeared in 1964 as Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh.
Where did Samuel Butler go in 1859 and why?
Samuel Butler sailed to New Zealand in September 1859 on the ship Roman Emperor. He went to put distance between himself and his family after questioning his faith, and he worked there as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station.
How did Samuel Butler influence science fiction and later writers?
Samuel Butler's Erewhon influenced Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Island. In Frank Herbert's Dune, the Butlerian Jihad, a revolt against thinking machines, is named after him.
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45 references cited across the entry
- 3Butler wrote The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler, Head-Master of Shrewsbury School 1798–1836, and Afterwards Bishop of Lichfield, published in two volumes in 1896.
- 4Clara G. Stillman (1932). Samuel Butler: A Mid-Victorian Modern. New York: The Viking Press.
- 5BookAn Illustrated Literary Guide to ShropshireGordon Dickins — Shropshire Libraries — 1987
- 7Butler, Samuel (1896). The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler, Head-Master of Shrewsbury School 1798–1836, and Afterwards Bishop of Lichfield, In So Far as They Illustrate the Scholastic, Religious
- 9Colour Library Book of Great British Writers, p. 207. Colour Library Books (Godalming, England) (1993). .
- 10BookVictorian Shrewsbury, Studies in the History of a County TownShropshire Libraries — 1984
- 11BookErnest Pontifex or The Way of All FleshSamuel Butler — Houghton Mifflin Company — 1964
- 12BookDictionary of National Biography, Second SupplementSmith, Elder & Co. — 1912
- 13BookOxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 8Elinor Shaffer — Oxford University Press — 2004
- 19Samuel Butler, or Sociobiology for Grown-UpsHoratio Morpurgo — Three Monkeys Online — May 2006
- 20The Encyclopedia of PhilosophyT. A. Gouge — The Macmillan Company & The Free Press — 1967
- 21Mark A. Bedau, Carol E. Cleland. (2010). The Nature of Life: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives from Philosophy and Science. Cambridge University Press. pp. 344–345.
- 22Peter J. Bowler (2003), Evolution: The History of an Idea. University of California Press. p. 259. .
- 23C. Leon Harris (1981), Evolution: Genesis and Revelations: With Readings from Empedocles to Wilson. State University of New York Press. p. 279. .
- 25Peter J. Bowler (2001), Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain. University of Chicago Press. p. 142. .
- 26Philip J. Pauly (1982), Samuel Butler and His Darwinian Critics. Victorian Studies. Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 161–180.
- 27Lee Elbert Holt (1989), Samuel Butler. Twayne Publishers. p. 44.
- 28George Gaylord Simpson (1961), Lamarck, Darwin and Butler: Three Approaches to Evolution. The American Scholar. Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 238–249.
- 29Peter J. Bowler (1983), The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolutionary Theories in the Decades Around 1900. Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 72. .
- 30Alfred Russel Wallace (1879), Evolution, Old and New. Nature 20, pp. 141–144.
- 31G. J. Romanes (1881), Unconscious Memory. Nature 23, pp. 285–287.
- 32Gregory Bateson, Form, Substance and Difference. General Semantics Bulletin, No. 37 (1970). Reprinted in the anthology Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press. .
- 34Browne, Janet (2006). Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography. New York: Grove Press, pp. 120–121.
- 37Obsessed with Handel: Samuel Butler's special collection9 December 2011
- 38Blom, Eric (1926). Stepchildren of Music. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., pp. 183–194.
- 40The Humour of Homer and Other Essays was reissued by Jonathan Cape in 1927 as Selected Essays by Samuel Butler.
- 41Journal"Erewhon" and the End of Utopian HumanismZemka, Sue — 2002
- 42Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence. Harper Collins, 2000, p. 635.
- 44JournalA Definitive Edition of Ernest PontifexEdward S. Lauterbach — 20 February 1964
- 45The revised edition was also published as God: Known and Unknown (Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Company, no date).