The way of all flesh
by Samuel Butler · first published 1900
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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 rancour, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional n
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…will, one takes of it, and as one proceeds with the reading, the worse it looks—to my eye, anyway. [EDIT] Other Butler, for free. Erewhon: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon The Way of All Flesh: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/the-way-of-a... If you read and like Erewhon, you'll probably also like the sequel Erewhon Revisited. Didn't see it on Standard Ebooks, but I assume…
on “The Odyssey by Homer, Translated by Samuel Butler” ↗I read The Way of All Flesh as a kid. I remember liking it but can't recall much more about it.
on “Darwin Among the Machines (1863)” ↗…even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and university education and found it a 'sickly, debilitating debauch'. There is much in middle-class life that looks…
on “Apple fires Chinese supplier for using underage workers” ↗…Russell’s personal connections to each. While I certainly enjoyed finding a dozen or so new albums to explore, the true triumph of the book lies in the vulnerable, reflective memoir threaded throughout. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler *A novel that follows 4-generations of the Ponitifex family, with a particular bildungsroman-esque thread around Ernest, a young man who’s naivete leads to his downfall and how his life…
on “Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?” ↗