Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

English composer, novelist, & satiric author; wrote mock-utopian novel "Erewhon" 1872, autobiographical novel "The Way of All Flesh" 1903.
Samuel Butler is the name of several notable persons: Samuel Butler (1612-1680), author of Hudibras; Samuel Butler (1774-1839), classical scholar; Samuel Butler (1835-1902), grandson of the scholar, author of Erewhon. This Samuel Butler is called "Erewhon" Butler to distinguish him from his 17th
Century secret sharer, who wrote Hudibras, a verse satire of the Puritans.1
Samuel Butler was the second child and first son of Thomas Butler (1806-86) and Fanny (neé Worsley, d.1873), born on 4 December 1835 at Langar Rectory in Nottinghamshire, where his father had his parish. He came from a line of clerics -- his grandfather, also called Samuel, was Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry -- and a career in the church looked a likely prospect for the young Samuel. Or so his father planned.
Butler went to Shrewsbury School, where his grandfather had been headmaster before he retired; then in 1854 he went up to St John's College, Cambridge (his father's alma mater), collecting a First in Classics in 1858. To the age of twenty-three his career was strikingly ordinary for a young man whose father had so carefully crafted his eldest son's passage to the priesthood. Thomas Butler, of course, is reputedly the model for the vicious bully Theobald Pontifex in Butler's masterwork The Way of All Flesh, and it would seem that Butler senior was not disinclined to put pressure, both physical and psychological, on his son as he matured. The two men were never close, although by the time Butler left Cambridge he was fairly sure in his own mind of his wish to take orders.…