The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
List: $22.99 | Sale: $16.09
Club: $11.49

The Way of All Flesh

Author: Samuel Butler

Narrator: Antony Ferguson

Unabridged: 15 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/12/2010

Categories: Fiction, Classic

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

"I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them."

With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth "in the bosom of a Christian family." With irony, wit, and sometimes rancor, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations.

The Way of All Flesh tells the story of Ernest Pontifex and his struggles with Victorian mores, his restrictive, highly religious family, and Victorian society itself. Butler is remembered as one of the greatest of the anti-Victorians, whose ideas reflected accurately the new, more liberal society that was to come following the death of England's great Queen, and the beginning of a new era.

About Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which remain in use to this day.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul on September 20, 2023

This is the story of a poor little rich boy. I don’t know about you, but I have practically zero sympathy for poor little rich boys. Call me flint-hearted. His name is Ernest Pontifex. The goose was not born that Ernest could say boo to. He is a spineless, feeble kid to be sure, but even had he been......more

Goodreads review by Baba on February 17, 2022

A semi-biographical story of four generations of the Pontifex family by Samuel Butler, that he only allowed to be published after his death that takes apart Victorian society focusing on the unrelenting hypocrisy of, in this case the monied religious family focusing on the detrimental effects of pat......more

Goodreads review by Stratos on May 07, 2020

Άλλο ένα αριστούργημα το οποίο σου δημιουργεί θλίψη για τα σημερινά ...αριστουργήματα που κυκλοφορούν κατά δεκάδες. Δεν περιγράφει αλλά διεισδύει στους χαρακτήρες, στη διάπλαση τους, στην εξέλιξη τους αναδεικνύοντας τις κρυφές αυτές λεπτομέρειες της ψυχοσύνθεσης των πρωταγωνιστούν που δύσκολα γραφίδ......more