Erewhon

1872, 1927 Modern Library edition
Samuel Butler
Erewhon, or Over the Range
Original price unknown, bought used obviously for $4.00
Surprisingly good condition hardcover
B

The name of the novel and its land is almost "nowhere" backwards, and some of the other names are similarly reversed, like "Yram" and "Ydgrun."  (The latter is for Mrs. Grundy, the symbol of stodgy, judgmental values.)  Butler did the same thing to the Victorian English culture he knew so well as the son of a clergyman.  He satirized it by sort of reversing its assumptions.  What's odd for a modern reader is not knowing exactly how to take the satire.  For instance, in Erewhon illness is criminal and crime is just a sickness.  Nowadays, there are people who believe that criminals are victims of society, and there are people who believe it's your fault if you're sick, even if you have cancer.  Were these attitudes coming into being as long ago as 140 years?

Lewis Mumford writes in the introduction, "Butler's wildest jokes are nearer to present-day truths than many sober Victorian platitudes.  His straighteners are our psychoanalysts and psychiatrists...."  If this was true in 1927, it's even more true in 2012.  Butler's three chapters from The Book of the Machines, with the fearful discussion of machines becoming more sophisticated and conscious, definitely seems prescient. 

The chapter on "the rights of animals," followed by "the rights of vegetables," takes vegetarianism and veganism to extremes, but the thing is, so do some modern diets.  It's also clear that meat-eating is on one level symbolic of sex, with everyone sneaking some on the side, and "a young man of promising amiable disposition" being told by his doctor to "eat meat, law or no law," yet feeling guilty about it, till "he stole secretly on a dark night into one of those dens in which meat was surreptitiously sold."  He takes it home and cooks it in his bedroom but is filled with "remorse and shame."  He goes back many times, despite guilt, until he's caught by the authorities.  In the end, the "poor boy" hangs himself.

Similarly, as Mumford notes, the Musical Banks are a satire on both modern religion and modern banking, and yet a more modern (post-modern?) reader than the original Modern Library reader is going to see religion and banking in a different way than in the 1920s.

Butler spends too much time explaining how he got to and about in Erewhon (Swift was much better at that sort of thing), but the actual substance of the satire is good.  I remember preferring the sequel, but that wasn't published till 1901, so we've got a long wait till I can compare the two.