The Way of All Flesh

About this book

Through four generations of the Pontifex family, Samuel Butler shows how cruelty and hypocrisy are passed from parents to children in respectable Victorian homes. Ernest Pontifex is raised by his father Theobald, a clergyman who beats him into learning, and his self-deceiving mother, and is pushed into the Church himself. Naïve and unprepared for life, he goes from one disaster to another, including a spell in prison, before slowly learning to think for himself and break free, guided by his kindly godfather Overton, who tells the story.

Context and significance

Butler wrote the novel between 1873 and 1884, but it was so harsh a portrait of his own family that it was published only in 1903, after his death. Its attack on Victorian family life influenced Bernard Shaw and many writers of the twentieth century. Read Butler's satire Erewhon.

About the author