 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
|||||
|
 |
 |
Biography of Samuel ButlerName: Samuel ButlerBirth Date: December 4, 1835 Death Date: 1902 Place of Birth: Langar, Nottinghamshire, England Nationality: English Gender: Male Occupations: novelist, essayist Samuel Butler The English novelist and essayist Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was a critic of established religious, social, and scientific ideas.Samuel Butler was born on Dec. 4, 1835, in Langar, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, the son of the local vicar. In a time of common paternal absolutism, his childhood seems to have been bleak and graceless. After taking a degree at Cambridge, he came into open conflict with his father over the question of his future profession, and at last he emigrated to New Zealand to become a sheep farmer. But though free of his father, he was not free of revolt, and the spirit of resentful rebelliousness marked much of his later life. In New Zealand he read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and wrote a series of newspaper articles setting forth Darwin's ideas and ingeniously applying the evolutionary hypothesis to machines. Having made a modest fortune, he returned to England in 1864.Erewhon (1872), Butler's first …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…naive religious zeal to despairing disillusionment, is imprisoned for propositioning an innocent girl, and upon his release makes a disastrous marriage. Finally free, he turns to a career as writer and intellectual gadfly, exposing the evils and hypocrisies of the established institutions and values that had twisted his own life.Erewhon Revisited (1901) returns to the problem of religion and examines the relationship between rational truth and religious faith. Further Reading The primary biographical source is Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler: A Memoir (2 vols., 1919). A shorter, more critical biography is Clara G. Stillman, Samuel Butler: A Mid-Victorian Modern (1932). Two good studies of Butler's ideas are P. N. Furbank, Samuel Butler (1948), and Basil Willey, Darwin and Butler: Two Versions of Evolution (1960).Butler, Samuel, Butleriana, Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1976. Jones, Henry Festing, Samuel Butler: a sketch, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1977.Raby, Peter, Samuel Butler: a biography, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. |