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    The Way of All Flesh
    The Way of All Flesh
    The Way of All Flesh
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Way of All Flesh

    Written by Samuel Butler

    Narrated by Antony Ferguson

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    "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 rancor, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations.

    The Way of All Flesh tells the story of Ernest Pontifex and his struggles with Victorian mores, his restrictive, highly religious family, and Victorian society itself. Butler is remembered as one of the greatest of the anti-Victorians, whose ideas reflected accurately the new, more liberal society that was to come following the death of England's great Queen, and the beginning of a new era.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 12, 2010
    ISBN9781400189663
    Author

    Samuel Butler

    Samuel Butler (1835-1901) was an English novelist, essayist, and critic whose satire Erewhon (1872) foreshadowed the collapse of the Victorian illusion of eternal progress and influenced every significant writer of utopian/dystopian fiction that followed. His autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh (1903), is generally considered a masterpiece.

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    Reviews for The Way of All Flesh

    3.5/5

    14 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      this book is a magnificent satire right up there with jonathan swift. it is a 19th century mommy dearest.
    • 4/5
      The Way of All Flesh tells the story of the Pontifax family over four generations, focusing on the last two generations, the loathsome Theobald and his son George. I loved the book. It is a sarcastic, scathing indictment of nearly every aspect of society. It is one of the funniest books I have ever read.
    • 2/5
      I did not appreciate the author's sneering attitude to things, as I recall
    • 5/5
      I read this back in the early 80s. If I happen to find a review I wrote at that time I will add it. I remember liking the book very much
    • 5/5
      I've always been fond of erudite books where the author isn't afraid to digress in order to tell you something insightful or just simply interesing, and Butler's most famous novel is a great example. His story follows the life of a young man, an everyman who carries in him Butler's beliefs, and reflects the society he lived in.
    • 3/5
      The first and last few chapters are great...unfortunately, the middle of the book happens.Still, it has one of my favorite quotes from any book (its in one of the first few chapters): "We must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do."
    • 2/5
      At first I was really enjoying this book, for I like the prolixity of Victorian novels and their comments on society. However, as the story of Ernest Pontifex wore on, and on and on, I found too much philosophizing with only occasional bits of dialogue, action and humor to break it up. The book was not published until 1903, years after the author's death, and is a good argument for the editor's blue pencil, which might have improved it. It was a book that was supposed to blow the lid off the Victorian family, not to mention the Church and society in general. Anyone who's read Anne Perry's Victorian historical mysteries will have come across far worse things happening to children in perfectly respectable families than anything that happens to Ernest. The narrator's voice grates more and more as he allows himself to give way to his desire to philosophize. I'd much rather be reading Trollope.
    • 4/5
      This is becoming a lost classic. It is very specific, very English novel that surprisingly captures enduring human feeling, from politicians that are too good to how it feels when you can no longer return to a place where you lived.
    • 4/5
      The 19th century novel tells a story of six generations of the Pontifexes through a disinterested narrator, Mr. Overton. The narration is both brilliant and flawed as Overton has access to even the inner thoughts of the characters. Brilliant because it is as if Mr. Overton is Ernest Pontifex, the protagonist, like how when you ask for advice, you would say, "My friend has this problem," and that "friend" is you. But if this is a veiled autobiography, then we must know that Overton is prejudiced and inaccurate about his evaluation of the characters.The dark-humored, Daniel-Defoesque novel starts off very slowly but the third volume of the book picks up and is in fact quite exciting. There are two great flaws which prevent the novel from being canonical: it has too many references to politicans, theologians, scientists and poets in 19th century so contemporary readers will fail to understand the book; and as an invective against against society and religion, this book uses the rhetoric of religion (didactic cant), which fails.
    • 1/5
      My second pass of this much-acclaimed early 20th century novel, and now I remember why I didn't remember -- verbose, pompous writing, author-intrusive and a window into Butler's navel.