Review: The Way of all Flesh

Samuel Butler, The Way of all Flesh (1903; this edition Dover Publications 2004)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/126512.The_Way_of_All_Flesh

This novel is Samuel Butler’s protest against Victorian-era hypocrisy. It centers around four generations of the Pontifex family.

The narrator, Edward Overton, is godfather to Ernest, eldest child of Theobald and Christina.

Theobald doubts whether he is suited to the ministry, but his father warms him against ‘the restless desire for change’ and threatens to cut him off, and he is ordained. The Misses Allaby play cards to see who will be matched to Theobald, and Christina wins.

Overton remembers, as a child, the deaths of old Mrs. Pontifex and her husband John a year later. Their son George inherits a fortune from his aunt Alethea, and he is quite comfortable in doing so. The estate is to be overseen by Overton, who loved Alethea but never married her, until Ernest is twenty-eight.

Ernest, a fourth generation Pontifex, becomes a clergyman, but his faith is sorely tested by controversies and unscrupulous individuals. He attempts a sexual assault on a woman he mistakenly believes to be of loose morals and is imprisoned. On leaving prison, he marries his parents’ former housemaid Ellen; they have two children and start a second hand clothing business. He discovers that Ellen is a bigamist and an alcoholic. Overton pays Ellen off and gives Ernest a job.

It is full of very erudite humour, jokes about people getting Latin phrases wrong, that sort of thing, which provides a charming picture of what life was like for a certain class of people like the Pontifexes. Theobald is probably one of the most horrible parents in the history of literature. There are seven pages on the difficulty Ernest had applying himself to his studies, entire chapters on Alethea’s will.

The writer George Orwell praised Butler as ‘courageous. He would say things that other people knew but didn’t dare to say.’[1] The society he paints is not picture-perfect. It’s full of adultery and illegitimate births. Even the clergymen are wicked.

We read these classics to understand why they were considered masterpieces at their time, to appreciate the beautiful, verbose language, writing style which we would not use, today, and to understand thinking and cultural assumptions that we have forgotten, helping us to understand history.

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[1] George Orwell, BBC Home Service, Talks for Schools, 15 June 1945, reprinted in Collected Works, I Belong to the Left, p. 186