Samuel Butler

Born in 1835 at Langar Rectory in Nottinghamshire, Samuel Butler grew up in a clerical family and was educated at Shrewsbury and St John's College, Cambridge. Expectations that he would enter the Church shaped his early life, but he gradually broke away from that path and developed into one of the most original literary critics of Victorian society.

Butler spent several years in New Zealand as a sheep farmer, an experience that broadened his outlook and later fed into his writing. He is best remembered for Erewhon (1872), a satirical novel that turns familiar ideas upside down, and for The Way of All Flesh, his powerful semi-autobiographical novel about family pressure, hypocrisy, and personal freedom, published after his death in 1903.

Alongside fiction, he wrote essays and criticism on religion, art, and evolution, often taking bold positions and questioning fashionable beliefs. That mix of humor, argument, and independence has kept his books alive long after the Victorian world he was writing against had passed.