The Way of All Flesh
Category: Literature
Tags: Literature
The Way of All Flesh is one of the time-bombs of literature, said V. S. Pritchett. One thinks of it lying in Samuel Butlers 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. Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butlers death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex family. A thinly veiled account of his own upbringing in the bosom of a God-fearing Christian family, Butlers scathingly funny depiction of the self-righteous hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life was hailed by George Bernard Shaw as one of the summits of human achievement. If the house caught on fire, the Victorian novel I would rescue from the flames would be The Way of All Flesh, wrote William Maxwell in The New Yorker. It is read, I believe, mostly by the young, bent on making out a case ag
