The Way of All Flesh

by Samuel Butler

Overview

Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh follows four generations of the Pontifex family. The novel is semi-autobiographical and attacks the hypocrisy that was characteristic in the Victorian era. It was written between 1873 and 1884, but Butler didn't risk publishing it in his life - it was instead finally released a year after Butler's death, in 1903.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412177702
Publisher:	eBooksLib
Publication date:	04/21/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	557 KB

About the Author

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) was an English author whose turbulent upbringing would inspire one of his greatest works, The Way of All Flesh. Butler grew up in a volatile home with an overbearing father who was both mentally and physically abusive. He was eventually sent to boarding school and then St. John's College where he studied Classics. As a young adult, he lived in a parish and aspired to become a clergyman but had a sudden crisis of faith. He decided to travel the world and create new experiences fueling his literary career.

Editorial Reviews

One thinks of it lying in Samuel Butler's desk for thirty years, waiting to blow up the Victorian family and with it the whole great pillared and balustraded edifice of the Victorian novel.”

V.S. Pritchett

[Butler] uses ordinary conversational English idiom, managing to seem perfectly at ease in it, and continually showing how rich in expressive turns and formulations and apt and vivid words it really is…This is the perfection of what one loosely thinks of as the ‘plain’ style and which of course is not ‘plain’ at all, but fashioned with hard labor and the most sensitive and resourceful skill. In writing Butler attained that ‘grace after the flesh’ for which Ernest pined in vain.”

P. N. Furbank

If the house caught on fire, the Victorian novel I would rescue from the flames would be not Vanity Fair or Bleak House but Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. It is read, I believe, mostly by the young, bent on making out a case against their elders, but Butler was fifty when he stopped working on it, and no reader much under that age is likely to appreciate the full beauty of its horrors, which are not the horrors of the Gothic novel but of family life.”

New Yorker

One of the summits of human achievement.”

George Bernard Shaw

A.A. Milne called THE WAY OF ALL FLESH the second-best novel in the English language, but it remains one of the least known. In this audio version David Timson brings out all of its wit and charm, although some knowledge of Victorian Britain may be necessary to appreciate the extent of its satire. Among the five generations of the Pontifex family, there are a fair number of important characters, but the book eventually concentrates on Ernest and his immediate family, including his godfather, Edward Overton, the novel's narrator. Through accent, tone, and some modest vocal gymnastics, Timson keeps all the major and a great many minor characters alive and individualized, maintaining listeners' engagement all the way to the end. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2024 - AudioFile