Samuel Butler, 1835–1902

Abstract

In terms of the internationally recognised canon of literature in English, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) is the most important work to emerge from New Zealand. It has been continuously in print since 1872, is included in almost all series of literary classics, is widely taught in universities, and receives international scholarly attention. It is accepted as a major work of Victorian prose, a key indicator of changing values, and as standing with More’s Utopia and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as the three outstanding examples of the genre of imagined world irony. Although Butler spent less than five years in New Zealand, wrote Erewhon after he left, and aimed its satire at Victorian England, the book is drawn in fundamental ways from his New Zealand experience, and must be described as a classic of New Zealand as well as English literature. The same is true of the retrospective Erewhon Revisited (1901). Significant reference to New Zealand, or material relating to his life there, can also be found (though largely unnoticed) in other works by Butler, including his immensely influential Notebooks (1912, 1934), and indirectly even his novel The Way of All Flesh (1903). His first book, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), is a wholly New Zealand text in its place of composition and subject matter, and is an important narrative of mid-Victorian colonial settlement. Apart from the obvious biographical significance of his New Zealand years, it has been argued that Butler’s encounter with the settler society of Canterbury Province, and the challenging terrain of the Southern Alps, was crucial in shaping his literary methods as a major ironist.