Book description
Samuel Butler was among the most wide-ranging of the accomplished crew of late Victorian writers to which be belonged — a forceful controversialist in the debates that surrounded Darwin’s theory of evolution, a painter who sometimes exhibited at the Royal Academy, an idiosyncratic critic and a gifted travel writer.
Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement," Butler’s autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood satirizes Victorian hypocrisy in its chronicle of the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex. Along the way, it offers a powerful indictment of 19th-century England’s major institutions.
