The Way Of All Flesh
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Few novels have cut as deeply into the hypocrisy of Victorian family life as Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, a devastating semi-autobiographical portrait of four generations of the Pontifex family, tracing the suffocating weight of inherited repression, religious cant, and parental tyranny from the Georgian era to the close of the nineteenth century. At its heart is Ernest Pontifex, a sensitive young man crushed beneath the expectations of a bullying clergyman father and a manipulative mother, whose painful journey through school, church, and social disgrace ultimately leads toward an unlikely and hard-won liberation. Butler's prose is sharp, ironic, and utterly unsentimental, wielding satire as a surgical instrument against the twin pillars of Victorian authority — the Church and the Family — with a precision that shocked readers when the novel was posthumously published in 1903. Narrated with cool detachment by the worldly Overton, the novel presents a devastating argument that character is less a matter of individual will than of biological and social inheritance, anticipating the concerns of both Freudian psychology and Darwinian thought. A landmark of English literature, it remains a work of startling modernity, and its final pages leave one wondering whether Ernest's freedom is genuine emancipation — or merely a different kind of cage.
Author: Samuel Butler
Format: Hardback
Genre: Classic fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Few novels have cut as deeply into the hypocrisy of Victorian family life as Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, a devastating semi-autobiographical portrait of four generations of the Pontifex family, tracing the suffocating weight of inherited repression, religious cant, and parental tyranny from the Georgian era to the close of the nineteenth century. At its heart is Ernest Pontifex, a sensitive young man crushed beneath the expectations of a bullying clergyman father and a manipulative mother, whose painful journey through school, church, and social disgrace ultimately leads toward an unlikely and hard-won liberation. Butler's prose is sharp, ironic, and utterly unsentimental, wielding satire as a surgical instrument against the twin pillars of Victorian authority — the Church and the Family — with a precision that shocked readers when the novel was posthumously published in 1903. Narrated with cool detachment by the worldly Overton, the novel presents a devastating argument that character is less a matter of individual will than of biological and social inheritance, anticipating the concerns of both Freudian psychology and Darwinian thought. A landmark of English literature, it remains a work of startling modernity, and its final pages leave one wondering whether Ernest's freedom is genuine emancipation — or merely a different kind of cage.