Butler, Samuel 1835-1902
English author, painter and musician

He was born in Langar Rectory, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, and educated at Shrewsbury and St John's College, Cambridge. Always quarrelling with his clergyman father, he abandoned the idea of taking orders and instead became a sheep farmer in New Zealand (1859-64). On returning to England he lived in London and wrote Erewhon (1872), a Utopian satire in which, for example, machines have been abolished for fear of their mastery over men's minds. The dominant theme of its supplement, Erewhon Revisited (1901), is the origin of religious belief. Butler was greatly influenced by Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), and in an earlier series of writings had tried to revive the 'vitalist' or 'creative' view of evolution, as in Luck or Cunning (1886), in opposition to Darwin's doctrine of natural selection. Butler also studied painting (his picture Mr Heatherley's Holiday is in the Tate Gallery, London), and loved music, composing two oratorios, gavottes, minuets, fugues, and a cantata. He later published translations of the Iliad (1898) and the Odyssey (1900), and his essay The Humour of Homer (1892) is a remarkable piece of literary criticism. He is best known, however, for his autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903, a work of moral realism on the causes of strife between different generations which left its mark on George Bernard Shaw and much 20th-century literature.

Bibliography: P N Furbank, Samuel Butler (1948); The Life and Letters of Dr Samuel Butler (1856)