CHAPTER 1 .sx CHAPTER 1 .sx Origins .sx " The Three Most Important Things a man has are briefly , his private parts , his money , and his religious opinions .sx " The statement , with the sting in its tail , comes from an outwardly conventional Victorian , bowler-hatted and black-suited .sx Was it conceived during Family Prayers , and recorded , like so many of Samuel Butler's notes and aphorisms , in the Reading Room of the British Museum ?sx Butler remains one of the great unclassifiable minds of the nineteenth century , with a reputation that rises and falls but obstinately resists definition .sx His versatility and curiosity led him into many areas of life and thought :sx religion , science , literature , art .sx He was artist and photographer , as well as novelist , critic , and philosopher , sheep farmer , company director and property developer .sx But his claim on our interest has additional support in the modern writers who were influenced by and interested in him :sx Shaw , first and foremost ; H.G. Wells , Lytton Strachey , the Woolfs , E.M. Forster , Ivy Compton-Burnett , Robert Graves , James Joyce .sx Combative , lucid , honest , with a mischievous sense of humour which surfaced at most inappropriate moments , Butler developed his intellectual muscle by questioning received ideas and attitudes .sx Betrayed as a child , he resolved never to be 'humbugged' again , while perplexingly playing the role of the archetypal English gentleman :sx public school and Cambridge ; chambers in Clifford's Inn ; British Museum , Royal Academy , correspondence columns of the Athenaeum .sx But a formative summer as an unpaid curate in the slums of London , long months on an emigrant ship and four years as a sheep farmer in New Zealand provided a second , less conventional education .sx He felt uneasy in the drawing-rooms of well-connected 'nice' people , preferring the atmosphere of public houses and music halls .sx In his irreverent autobiographical novel , The Way of All Flesh , published after his death , in 1903 , Butler created a new kind of being fit for the modern world , Ernest Pontifex ( Ernest Priest) .sx Writing about Ernest's education , which was parallel to his own , he exclaims :sx " What a lie , what a sickly debilitating debauch did not Ernest's school and university career now seem to him , in comparison with his life in prison and as a tailor in Blackfriars .sx " ( WF 368 ) For all the bachelor , middle-class security of his London chambers and his comfortable routine , Butler lived in close awareness of the less affluent and more bohemian .sx For his pleasures , he would make his weekly visit to Madame Dumas in Islington , or take the steamer for a day trip to Margate or Clacton , or accompany his servant Alfred to the pantomime .sx One can mock , as Malcolm Muggeridge did in his caustic study of Butler , The Earnest Atheist , Butler's reliance on his cheque book and his meticulous book-keeping by double entry ; but he was living in a tightly knit , urban society that put a monetary value on everyone and everything , in spite of denials to the contrary .sx Money was luck , and freedom .sx Butler's nostalgia for the pastoral simplicity of the eighteenth century , partly expressed in the utopia of his novel Erewhon , or in his affection for the healthy , good-looking peasants of the Italian Alps , was fed by his intimate contact with the realities of London ; and every day , like a good Victorian but in his own highly sceptical way , he thought about the impact of religion and the nature of God .sx When Butler escaped from England and landed in New Zealand as a young immigrant of twenty-four , he climbed the volcanic hills that surround Port Lyttelton harbour to have a sight of his new country .sx The Canterbury Plains , lovely in colouring , stretched away into the distance , where his eye was met by the extensive blue line of the Southern Alps .sx As soon as he saw the mountains , he longed to cross them .sx Within a few weeks , he had fulfilled his wish , and returned .sx It was a pattern he would repeat on several occasions during his years in South Island , most memorably in his courageous explorations of the headwaters of the Rangitata river which formed the foundation of the fictional journey over the range and on into 'Erewhon' .sx The impulse to explore and discover , preferably in isolation , characterised his restless cast of mind .sx If some grand obstacle loomed on the horizon , mysterious and forbidding - the Anglican God , the Victorian family , Darwin , Homer - he set out to investigate for himself ; and he would come back from these mental expeditions , having mapped out the territory to his own satisfaction , to announce to an uninterested world that the mystery had been solved .sx In his final years , Butler became acutely conscious of the symmetry of his literary career ; it began in 1872 with Erewhon and ended in 1901 with Erewhon Revisited , the emotional climax of which is set on the very summit of a mountain range , in the shadow of giant statues guarding the pass into the magical country beyond .sx The rhythm of Butler's life , in an age when travel was suddenly available and cheap , was punctuated by journeys .sx The railway and the steamship made the whole world more accessible to mid-nineteenth-century England , and when Butler was planning to emigrate , fleeing the twin spectres of his father and ordination , he considered , in rapid succession , the merits of Liberia , the Cape and British Columbia .sx In the end New Zealand offered the advantage of being as far away from England in space and time as was practical , and proved to be his most significant journey .sx But every setting out was matched by a return .sx England , and the English society , which so confounded and oppressed him , kept calling to him ; and however hard he strained at the ties that held him , he would be drawn , quietly but inexorably , back to his base at Clifford's Inn , to the circle of his close friends , even , in spite of his loud protests to the contrary , to his family .sx In London he would work at his books , his painting or his music until his eyes failed and his brain reeled .sx Then he would pack his bags again and go , in summer to the Alps , at Easter or Whitsun to Boulogne , or on Thursdays and Sundays to Gad's Hill or the Downs .sx He enjoyed travelling light .sx The British Museum was his library .sx He could find a piano anywhere , and in any event carried most of Handel in his head .sx Yet his rooms at Clifford's Inn were stuffed with objects , the walls crowded with photographs , sketches and paintings .sx He kept piles of his own unsold books , stacks of manuscripts , letters , notebooks , boxes of glass negatives .sx He lived among the residue of his own life , a lumber-room existence from which little was discarded because everything had meaning .sx His memory was equally retentive .sx He recalled images , incidents , casual encounters and conversations , and recorded them in his notebooks and correspondence , and he kept pressed copies of most of his letters .sx Even when travelling , he laid down a trail of forwarding addresses , postes restantes and trusted hoteliers to ensure that he maintained contact with his friends and with his family .sx It is in his relations with his family that Butler's paradoxical nature is most evident .sx His father was his intimate enemy .sx He felt rejected by his mother .sx He claimed to dislike his sisters .sx He hated his brother .sx He left England in pique and hurt to escape from the stifling incomprehension of his parents and what he believed they stood for ; yet he wrote to them at great length from New Zealand , and when they proudly edited his letters and published them , he turned on them after correcting the proofs and rejected the book , A First Year in Canterbury Settlement , as being infected with the taint of the family home , Langar .sx But he could not let them go .sx On occasions , he was barred from the house ; on others , he threatened to leave , never to meet again .sx He always returned , and was present at the deathbeds of his mother and his father .sx The combat was resolvable in one sense only by death , and , in another , by fiction .sx The Way of All Flesh is the story of Butler's elemental conflict with his family .sx V.S. Pritchett described it as one of the time-bombs of literature , " lying in Butler's desk at Clifford's Inn for thirty years , waiting to blow up the Victorian family and with it the whole great pillared and balustraded edifice of the Victorian novel " .sx The book follows the path of much of Butler's own early development closely , and is undeniably , if selectively , autobiographical .sx He purged himself during the long process of its creation .sx He wrote it partly out of resentment and remembered hate ; but he turns the irony as savagely on himself as on his parents and sisters , and on the whole ethos of Victorian values which he abominated and yet knew himself to be inescapably a part of .sx The novel is an exercise in demythologising the family , both as an institution and in personal terms .sx It is the detailed , intimate record of Butler's memories , nightmares and dreams , an extended gloss on the naive painting , 'Family Prayers' , which he painted in 1864 and which was his first attempt to open up the dark , locked room of his childhood .sx Like Ingmar Bergman , who also survived an upbringing in which sin and punishment prevailed over grace and forgiveness , Samuel Butler transformed his painful experience of childhood into art .sx Bergman , discussing the great film makers , commented :sx " When film is not a document , it is dream .sx " Butler's novel is dream disguised as document .sx However much Butler strove to recreate himself , he was hyper - conscious of being the product of his parents , grandparents and ancestors ; and he spent much of his life investigating his origins .sx The key figure in the family was Samuel's grandfather and namesake , Headmaster of Shrewsbury public school and Bishop of Lichfield , who died when he was four .sx It was Samuel's birthday , and a village woman who did sewing at Langar Rectory brought him a little pot of honey .sx " My father came in , told us grandpapa was dead , and took away the honey saying it would not be good for us .sx " .sx Samuel had only one direct memory of his grandfather , less ominous :sx " I had a vision of myself before a nursery fire with Dr Butler walking up and down the room watching my sister Harrie and myself .sx " ( M1 .sx 19 ) The 'portrait' of Dr Butler in The Way of All Flesh , translated into George Pontifex , a successful publisher of religious works , is ambivalent .sx His fictional epitaph ( WF 110) :sx HE NOW LIES AWAITING A JOYFUL RESURRECTION .sx AT THE LAST DAY .sx WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS .sx THAT DAY WILL DISCOVER .sx hints at Butler's uncertainty about his own judgment of him .sx When he eventually inherited a dinner service of silver plate , presented to Dr Butler when he became Bishop of Lichfield , he decided to sell it .sx I took it to a silversmith's in the Strand , or rather got them to send some one to see it ; he said it was very good , but of a period ( 1836 ) now out of fashion .sx 'There is one especial test of respectability in plate,' he remarked ; 'we seldom find it but , when we do , we consider it the most correct thing and the best guarantee of solid prosperity that anything in plate can give .sx When there is a silver venison dish we know that the plate comes from an owner of the very highest respectability .sx ' .sx My grandfather had a silver venison dish .sx .sx To this note Butler added a P.S. , after he had written the monumental The Life and Letters of Dr Samuel Butler :sx When I wrote the above , I knew nothing about my grandfather except that he had been a great schoolmaster - and I did not like schoolmasters ; and then a bishop - and I did not like bishops ; and that he was supposed to be like my father .sx [He does not need to add , 'and I did not like my father' .sx ] Of course when I got hold of his papers , I saw what he was and fell head over ears in love with him .sx Had I known then what I know now , I do not think I could have sold the plate ; but it was much better that I should , and I have raised a far better monument to his memory than ever the plate was .sx ( M2 .sx 50-1 ) .sx