SAMUEL

See also:

• BUTLER
• BUTLER (or BOTELER), SAMUEL (1612–168o)
• BUTLER (through the O. Fr. bouteillier, from the Late Lat. buticularius, buticula, a bottle)
• BUTLER, ALBAN (1710-1773)
• BUTLER, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1818-1893)
• BUTLER, CHARLES (1750–1832)
• BUTLER, GEORGE (1774-1853)
• BUTLER, JOSEPH (1692-1752)
• BUTLER, NICHOLAS MURRAY (1862– )
• BUTLER, SAMUEL (1774-1839)
• SAMUEL BUTLER (1835-1902)
• BUTLER, SIR WILLIAM FRANCIS (1838– )
• BUTLER, WILLIAM ARCHER (1814-1848)

BUTLER (1835-1902)  , English author, son of the Rev . Thomas Butler, and grandson of the foregoing, was born at Langar, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, on the 4th of December 1835 . He was educated at Shrewsbury school, and at St John's College, Cambridge . He took a high place in the classical tripos of 1858, and was intended for the Church . His opinions, however, prevented his carrying out this intention, and he sailed to New Zealand in the autumn of 1859 . He owned a sheep run in the Upper Rangitata district of the province of Canterbury, and in less than five years was able to return home with a moderate competence, most of which was afterwards lost in unlucky investments . The Rangitata district supplied the setting for his romance of Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872), satirizing the Darwinian theory and conventional religion . Erewhon had a sequel thirty years later (1901) in Erewhon Revisited, in which the narrator of the earlier romance, who had escaped from Erewhon in a balloon, finds himself, on revisiting the country after a considerable interval, the object of a topsy-turvy cult, to which he gave the name of " Sunchildism." In 1873 he had published a book of similar tendency, The Fair Haven, which purported to be a "work in defence of the miraculous element in our Lord's ministry upon earth " by a fictitious J . P . Owen, of whom he'wrote a memoir . Butler was a man of great versatility, who pursued his investigations in classical scholarship, in Shakespearian criticism, biology and art with equal independence and originality . On his return from New Zealand he had established himself at Clifford's Inn, and studied painting, exhibiting regularly in the Academy between 1868 and 1876 .

But with the publication of

Life and Habit (1877) he began to recognize literature as his life work . The book was followed by three others, attacking Darwinism—Evolution Old and New, or the Theories of BuJon, Dr Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck as compared with that of Mr C . Darwin (1879); Unconscious Memory (188o), a comparison between the theory of Dr E . Hering and the Philosophy of the Unconscious of Dr E. von Hartmann; and Luck or Cunning (1886) . He had a thorough knowledge of northern Italy and its art . In Ex Voto (1888) he introduced many English readers to the art of Tabachetti and Gaudenzio Ferrari at Varallo . He learnt nearly the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart, and translated both poems (1898 and 1900) into colloquial English prose . In his Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) he propounded two theories: that the poem was the work of a woman, who drew her own portrait in Nausicaa; and that it was written at Trapani, in Sicily, a proposition which he supported by elaborate investigations on the spot . In another book on the Shakespeare Sonnets (1899) he aimed at destroying the explanations of the orthodox commentators . Butler was also a musician, or, as he called himself, a Handelian, and in imitation of the style of Handel he wrote in collaboration with H . Festing Jones a secular oratorio, Narcissus (1888), and had completed his share of another, Ulysses, at the time of his death on the 18th of June 1902 . His other works include: Life and Letters (1896) of Dr Samuel Butler, his grandfather, headmaster of Shrewsbury school and afterwards bishop of Lichfield; Alps and Sanctuaries (1881); and two posthumous works edited by R .

A . Streatfeild, The Way of All Flesh (1903), a novel; and Essays on Life, Art and

Science (1904) . See Samuel Butler, Records and Memorials (1903), by R . A . Streatfeild, a collection printed for private circulation, the most important article included being one by H . Festing Jones originally published in The Eagle (Cambridge, December 1902) .