Sir Samuel Butler's novel ''The Way of All Flesh'', which was published posthumously a year after his death in 1902, made an important addition to modern English literature. Butler, first of all, asserted that she had begun the book much earlier, in the early 1970s, and had even revised it at that time, in the early 1980s. This autobiographical account of a difficult childhood and disturbed adulthood sheds a radical light on the home hypocrisy of a Victorian clergy family. It also portends the disintegration of bourgeois ideas from the nineteenth century in the wake of the First World War and the ways in which successive generations have questioned traditional norms. This book by Samuel Butler is regarded as a semi-autobiography in which he criticizes "Victorian Hypocrisy." Doctor Overton, who served as Earnest Pontifex's godfather, is narrating the story in this instance.
Butler was the grandson of Samuel Butler, the principal of Shrewsbury School and afterwards the bishop of Lichfield. He was the son of the Reverend Thomas Butler. The young Samuel transferred to St. John's College in Cambridge after spending six years at Shrewsbury, where he graduated in 1858. In order to prepare for holy orders, young Butler even went so far as to do a little "slumming" in a London parish because his father wanted him to become a clergyman. He was being pulled away from all his father stood for, including his family, the church, and Christianity itself-or at least what it had seemed to imply at Langar Rectory-by the current of his fierce independence and heresy. After an unpleasant incident with his father, Butler left Cambridge, the church, and his home and emigrated to New Zealand, where (using money provided by his father) he established a sheep run in the Canterbury settlement. Butler then returned to Cambridge and continued his musical studies and drawing. After doubling his money in New Zealand, Butler left for England in 1864 and moved into the Clifford's Inn apartment that would serve as his permanent residence. The Way of All Flesh, which was released in 1903, the year after Butler passed away, is widely regarded as his best work. It undoubtedly encompasses a lot of the essential elements of Butlerism.
