The Way of All Flesh

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.

First Sentence

WHEN I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I remember an old man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings, and who used to hobble about the street of our village with the help of a stick.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The Way of All FleshHardcoverBuccaneer Books1983-06-01
• Way of All FleshPaperbackAirmont Pub Co1900-06-01
• The way of all fleshMicroformGrant Richards1903-01-01
• The way of all fleshCape1926-01-01
• The way of all fleshPub. for the Classics Club by Walter J. Black1942-01-01
• THE WAY OF ALL FLESH BY SAMUEL BUTLERWALTER BLACK, CLASSICS CLUB1948-01-01