Butler, Samuel, 1612–80, English poet and satirist

Butler, Samuel, 1612–80, English poet and satirist. During the Puritan Revolution he served Sir Samuel Luke, a noted officer of Cromwell. After the restoration of Charles II, he wrote his famous mock-heroic poem Hudibras (pub. in 3 parts, 1663, 1664, 1678), an envenomed satire against the Puritans in which Luke was the model for the butt Sir Hudibras. He was also the author of other verse satires, some of them not published until the 20th cent.

Bibliography

See J. Wilders' edition of Hudibras (1967); biography by T. Penelhum (1985); studies by H. DeQuehen, ed. (1979) and T. L. Jeffers (1981).

Butler, Samuel, 1835–1902, English author

Butler, Samuel, 1835–1902, English author. He was the son and grandson of eminent clergymen. In 1859, refusing to be ordained, he went to New Zealand, where he established a sheep farm and in a few years made a modest fortune. He returned to England in 1864 and devoted himself to a variety of interests, including art, music, biology, and literature. Besides exhibiting some of his paintings (1868–76) at the Royal Academy, he composed several works in collaboration with Henry Festings Jones, among them the Handelian Narcissus: A Dramatic Cantata (1888). His Erewhon, in which he satirized English social and economic injustices by describing a country in which manners and laws were the reverse of those in England, appeared in 1872. It brought Butler immediate literary fame. Erewhon Revisited was published in 1901. Butler opposed Darwin's explanation of evolution, finding it too mechanistic, and he expounded his own theories in Evolution Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification? (1887). In his single novel, the autobiographical The Way of All Flesh (1903), he attacked the Victorian pattern of life, in particular the ecclesiastical environment in which he was reared. Brilliantly ironic and witty, The Way of All Flesh is ranked among the great English novels. Butler's notebooks were published in 1912.

Bibliography

See selections from the notebooks ed. by G. Keynes and B. Hill (1951). See also A. Sliver, ed., The Family Letters of Samuel Butler, 1841–1886 (1962); biographies by H. F. Jones (1921, repr. 1973), L. E. Holt (1964), and P. Henderson (1953, repr. 1967); study by W. G. Becker (1925, repr. 1964).

Butler, Samuel

(born Feb. 8, 1612, Strensham, Worcestershire, Eng.—died Sept. 25, 1680, London) British poet and satirist. He held several clerical positions, where he could observe cranks and scoundrels like those whose antics he targeted. He is famous for Hudibras (1663–78), a mock-heroic poem skewering the fanaticism, pretentiousness, pedantry, and hypocrisy he saw in militant Puritanism. It is the most memorable burlesque poem in English and the first English satire that successfully attacked ideas rather than personalities.

Butler, Samuel

Samuel Butler, detail of an oil painting by Charles Gogin, 1896; in the National Portrait Gallery, …

(credit: Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born Dec. 4, 1835, Langar Rectory, Nottinghamshire, Eng.—died June 18, 1902, London) British novelist, essayist, and critic. Descended from distinguished clergymen, he grappled for many years with Christianity and evolution, first embracing, then rejecting, Charles Darwin's theories in his writings. He is best known for The Way of All Flesh (1903), his autobiographical novel that tells, with ruthless wit and lack of sentiment, the story of his escape from the suffocating moral atmosphere of his home circle. In his lifetime his reputation rested on the utopian satire Erewhon (1872), which foreshadowed the end of the Victorian illusion of eternal progress.