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    The Way Of All Flesh: "Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime."
    The Way Of All Flesh: "Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime."
    The Way Of All Flesh: "Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime."
    Ebook178 pages2 hours

    The Way Of All Flesh: "Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime."

    By Samuel Butler

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Samuel Butler (4th December 1835 – 18th June 1902) had both a father and grandfather in the church and was being groomed by his father to be a priest. However, after a first at Cambridge, he decided he wanted to be an artist. His father could not and would not consider such a thing and by mutual consent Samuel went to New Zealand to be a sheep farmer. Here he started writing which he continued on his return to London as well as taking up painting. Whilst he did have several paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy, his talent undoubtably was in his writing but the extent of which was only really apparent after his death. This was due entirely to his great work, “The Way of All Flesh” published the year after he died to tumultuous acclaim which is well illustrated by George Bernard Shaw describing it as "one of the summits of human achievement." “The Way of All Flesh” is a thinly disguised autobiographical account of his own harsh Christian upbringing as it traces the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex and his family. Along the way, it satires Victorian values and beliefs and with brilliant wit and irony offers a powerful indictment of most 19th-century institutions in England. Each generation has found that despite the book savaging Victorian hypocrisy, it still speaks to every era as ultimately the theme of young people growing up wanting a greater degree of personal freedom than their parents is very much alive and kicking in most families around the world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Word To The Wise
    Release dateAug 20, 2013
    ISBN9781780009001
    The Way Of All Flesh: "Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime."
    Author

    Samuel Butler

    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.

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    Reviews for The Way Of All Flesh

    3.5/5

    338 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is becoming a lost classic. It is very specific, very English novel that surprisingly captures enduring human feeling, from politicians that are too good to how it feels when you can no longer return to a place where you lived.
    • 5/5
      I read this back in the early 80s. If I happen to find a review I wrote at that time I will add it. I remember liking the book very much
    • 4/5
      The Way of All Flesh tells the story of the Pontifax family over four generations, focusing on the last two generations, the loathsome Theobald and his son George. I loved the book. It is a sarcastic, scathing indictment of nearly every aspect of society. It is one of the funniest books I have ever read.
    • 1/5
      My second pass of this much-acclaimed early 20th century novel, and now I remember why I didn't remember -- verbose, pompous writing, author-intrusive and a window into Butler's navel.
    • 5/5
      I've always been fond of erudite books where the author isn't afraid to digress in order to tell you something insightful or just simply interesing, and Butler's most famous novel is a great example. His story follows the life of a young man, an everyman who carries in him Butler's beliefs, and reflects the society he lived in.
    • 3/5
      The first and last few chapters are great...unfortunately, the middle of the book happens.Still, it has one of my favorite quotes from any book (its in one of the first few chapters): "We must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do."
    • 5/5
      this book is a magnificent satire right up there with jonathan swift. it is a 19th century mommy dearest.
    • 4/5
      The 19th century novel tells a story of six generations of the Pontifexes through a disinterested narrator, Mr. Overton. The narration is both brilliant and flawed as Overton has access to even the inner thoughts of the characters. Brilliant because it is as if Mr. Overton is Ernest Pontifex, the protagonist, like how when you ask for advice, you would say, "My friend has this problem," and that "friend" is you. But if this is a veiled autobiography, then we must know that Overton is prejudiced and inaccurate about his evaluation of the characters.The dark-humored, Daniel-Defoesque novel starts off very slowly but the third volume of the book picks up and is in fact quite exciting. There are two great flaws which prevent the novel from being canonical: it has too many references to politicans, theologians, scientists and poets in 19th century so contemporary readers will fail to understand the book; and as an invective against against society and religion, this book uses the rhetoric of religion (didactic cant), which fails.
    • 2/5
      I did not appreciate the author's sneering attitude to things, as I recall
    • 2/5
      At first I was really enjoying this book, for I like the prolixity of Victorian novels and their comments on society. However, as the story of Ernest Pontifex wore on, and on and on, I found too much philosophizing with only occasional bits of dialogue, action and humor to break it up. The book was not published until 1903, years after the author's death, and is a good argument for the editor's blue pencil, which might have improved it. It was a book that was supposed to blow the lid off the Victorian family, not to mention the Church and society in general. Anyone who's read Anne Perry's Victorian historical mysteries will have come across far worse things happening to children in perfectly respectable families than anything that happens to Ernest. The narrator's voice grates more and more as he allows himself to give way to his desire to philosophize. I'd much rather be reading Trollope.

    Book preview

    The Way Of All Flesh - Samuel Butler

    Samuel Butler’s The Way Of All Flesh

    PREFACE

    Samuel Butler began to write The Way of All Flesh about the year

    1872, and was engaged upon it intermittently until 1884.  It is

    therefore, to a great extent, contemporaneous with Life and Habit, and

    may be taken as a practical illustration of the theory of heredity

    embodied in that book.  He did not work at it after 1884, but for various

    reasons he postponed its publication.  He was occupied in other ways, and

    he professed himself dissatisfied with it as a whole, and always intended

    to rewrite or at any rate to revise it.  His death in 1902 prevented him

    from doing this, and on his death-bed he gave me clearly to understand

    that he wished it to be published in its present form.  I found that the

    MS. of the fourth and fifth chapters had disappeared, but by consulting

    and comparing various notes and sketches, which remained among his

    papers, I have been able to supply the missing chapters in a form which I

    believe does not differ materially from that which he finally adopted.

    With regard to the chronology of the events recorded, the reader will do

    well to bear in mind that the main body of the novel is supposed to have

    been written in the year 1867, and the last chapter added as a postscript

    in 1882.

    R. A. STREATFEILD.

    CHAPTER I

    When I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I remember an old

    man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings, and who used to hobble

    about the street of our village with the help of a stick.  He must have

    been getting on for eighty in the year 1807, earlier than which date I

    suppose I can hardly remember him, for I was born in 1802.  A few white

    locks hung about his ears, his shoulders were bent and his knees feeble,

    but he was still hale, and was much respected in our little world of

    Paleham.  His name was Pontifex.

    His wife was said to be his master; I have been told she brought him a

    little money, but it cannot have been much.  She was a tall, square-

    shouldered person (I have heard my father call her a Gothic woman)

    who had insisted on being married to Mr Pontifex when he was young and

    too good-natured to say nay to any woman who wooed him.  The pair had

    lived not unhappily together, for Mr Pontifex's temper was easy and he

    soon learned to bow before his wife's more stormy moods.

    Mr Pontifex was a carpenter by trade; he was also at one time parish

    clerk; when I remember him, however, he had so far risen in life as to be

    no longer compelled to work with his own hands.  In his earlier days he

    had taught himself to draw.  I do not say he drew well, but it was

    surprising he should draw as well as he did.  My father, who took the

    living of Paleham about the year 1797, became possessed of a good many of

    old Mr Pontifex's drawings, which were always of local subjects, and so

    unaffectedly painstaking that they might have passed for the work of some

    good early master.  I remember them as hanging up framed and glazed in

    the study at the Rectory, and tinted, as all else in the room was tinted,

    with the green reflected from the fringe of ivy leaves that grew around

    the windows.  I wonder how they will actually cease and come to an end as

    drawings, and into what new phases of being they will then enter.

    Not content with being an artist, Mr Pontifex must needs also be a

    musician.  He built the organ in the church with his own hands, and made

    a smaller one which he kept in his own house.  He could play as much as

    he could draw, not very well according to professional standards, but

    much better than could have been expected.  I myself showed a taste for

    music at an early age, and old Mr Pontifex on finding it out, as he soon

    did, became partial to me in consequence.

    It may be thought that with so many irons in the fire he could hardly be

    a very thriving man, but this was not the case.  His father had been a

    day labourer, and he had himself begun life with no other capital than

    his good sense and good constitution; now, however, there was a goodly

    show of timber about his yard, and a look of solid comfort over his whole

    establishment.  Towards the close of the eighteenth century and not long

    before my father came to Paleham, he had taken a farm of about ninety

    acres, thus making a considerable rise in life.  Along with the farm

    there went an old-fashioned but comfortable house with a charming garden

    and an orchard.  The carpenter's business was now carried on in one of

    the outhouses that had once been part of some conventual buildings, the

    remains of which could be seen in what was called the Abbey Close.  The

    house itself, embosomed in honeysuckles and creeping roses, was an

    ornament to the whole village, nor were its internal arrangements less

    exemplary than its outside was ornamental.  Report said that Mrs Pontifex

    starched the sheets for her best bed, and I can well believe it.

    How well do I remember her parlour half filled with the organ which her

    husband had built, and scented with a withered apple or two from the

    pyrus japonica that grew outside the house; the picture of the prize ox

    over the chimney-piece, which Mr Pontifex himself had painted; the

    transparency of the man coming to show light to a coach upon a snowy

    night, also by Mr Pontifex; the little old man and little old woman who

    told the weather; the china shepherd and shepherdess; the jars of

    feathery flowering grasses with a peacock's feather or two among them to

    set them off, and the china bowls full of dead rose leaves dried with bay

    salt.  All has long since vanished and become a memory, faded but still

    fragrant to myself.

    Nay, but her kitchen and the glimpses into a cavernous cellar beyond it,

    wherefrom came gleams from the pale surfaces of milk cans, or it may be

    of the arms and face of a milkmaid skimming the cream; or again her

    storeroom, where among other treasures she kept the famous lipsalve which

    was one of her especial glories, and of which she would present a shape

    yearly to those whom she delighted to honour.  She wrote out the recipe

    for this and gave it to my mother a year or two before she died, but we

    could never make it as she did.  When we were children she used sometimes

    to send her respects to my mother, and ask leave for us to come and take

    tea with her.  Right well she used to ply us.  As for her temper, we

    never met such a delightful old lady in our lives; whatever Mr Pontifex

    may have had to put up with, we had no cause for complaint, and then Mr

    Pontifex would play to us upon the organ, and we would stand round him

    open-mouthed and think him the most wonderfully clever man that ever was

    born, except of course our papa.

    Mrs Pontifex had no sense of humour, at least I can call to mind no signs

    of this, but her husband had plenty of fun in him, though few would have

    guessed it from his appearance.  I remember my father once sent me down

    to his workship to get some glue, and I happened to come when old

    Pontifex was in the act of scolding his boy.  He had got the lad, a

    pudding-headed fellow, by the ear and was saying, What?  Lost again - smothered o' wit.  (I believe it was the boy who was himself supposed

    to be a wandering soul, and who was thus addressed as lost.)

    Now, look here, my lad, he continued, "some boys are born stupid, and

    thou art one of them; some achieve stupidity, that's thee again, Jim, thou

    wast both born stupid and hast greatly increased thy birthright and

    some" (and here came a climax during which the boy's head and ear were

    swayed from side to side) "have stupidity thrust upon them, which, if it

    please the Lord, shall not be thy case, my lad, for I will thrust

    stupidity from thee, though I have to box thine ears in doing so," but I

    did not see that the old man really did box Jim's ears, or do more than

    pretend to frighten him, for the two understood one another perfectly

    well.  Another time I remember hearing him call the village rat-catcher

    by saying, Come hither, thou three-days-and-three-nights, thou,

    alluding, as I afterwards learned, to the rat-catcher's periods of

    intoxication; but I will tell no more of such trifles.  My father's face

    would always brighten when old Pontifex's name was mentioned.  "I tell

    you, Edward, he would say to me, old Pontifex was not only an able man,

    but he was one of the very ablest men that ever I knew."

    This was more than I as a young man was prepared to stand.  "My dear

    father, I answered, what did he do?  He could draw a little, but could

    he to save his life have got a picture into the Royal Academy exhibition?

    He built two organs and could play the Minuet in Samson on one and the

    March in Scipio on the other; he was a good carpenter and a bit of a

    wag; he was a good old fellow enough, but why make him out so much abler

    than he was?"

    My boy, returned my father, "you must not judge by the work, but by the

    work in connection with the surroundings.  Could Giotto or Filippo Lippi,

    think you, have got

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