Book description
'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 novel of a family's life through
several generations.
