The Way of All Flesh

1884 (see below), undated Classics Club edition
Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh
Original price unknown, bought used for $4.75
Surprisingly good condition hardcover
B

Butler worked on this book from 1872 to 1884 but it wasn't published in his lifetime.  So I'm going with the latter date.  Like Erewhon, it's both a very Victorian book and a very anti-Victorian book.  There seem to be autobiographical elements in the tale of a young man who first gives in to and then rebels against his minister father.  The young man is named Ernest because his mother values earnestness, an attitude that Wilde would parody in guess what play.

I laughed out loud a few times during the first half of the novel, even though it was about how terrible Ernest's parents are.  Like Erewhonian parents, they see children as a burden and make their offspring feel guilty about it.  Of course, there's nothing funny about this in real life, but Butler has a way of bringing out the bitter humour.  In one passage, Butler draws conclusions about the history of British fatherhood based on fiction:  "The violent type of father, as described by Fielding, Richardson, Smollett and Sheridan, is now hardly...likely to find a place in literature...but the type was much too persistent not to have been drawn from nature closely. The parents in Miss Austen's novels are less like savage wild beasts than those of her predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with suspicion, and an uneasy feeling that le pere de famille est capable de tout makes itself sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part of her writings."

The second half of the novel focuses on Ernest's adulthood and I found it a bit less interesting and less funny.  Butler goes up to "the present," 1882, in order to show that Ernest's own "illegitimate" children, whom he's had poor but (mostly) honest strangers bring up, have turned out well.  This is ironic in light of what's going to be revealed in Erewhon Revisited....