Erewhon (1872) - Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler

Category: Classic

Narrator: Michael Maloney

Tags: Classic, Adults, Literature

Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins Release date: 04-30-13 Publisher: Audible Studios, SUBTITLED Over the Range, The wittiest of Victorian dystopias by the periods arch anti-Victorian. The hero Higgs finds himself in New Zealand., Assisted by a native, Chowbok, he makes a perilous journey across a mountain range to Erewhon (say it backwards), an upside-down world in which crime is cured and illness punished, where universities are institutions of Unreason and technology is banned. The state religion is worship of the goddess Ydgrun (ie Mrs Grundy bourgeois morality). Does it sound familiar? Higgs escapes by balloon, with the sweetheart he has found there., The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are based on Butlers own experiences in New Zealand, where, as a young man, he worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years (186064), and explored parts of the interior of the South Island and which he wrote about in his A First Year in Cante