Samuel Butler Research Articles

The Other Darwin’s Plots: Evolution as Literature in Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Butler and George Bernard Shaw

Whereas Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots traces the sometimes-indirect impact of Charles Darwin on a number of major Victorian novels, this article proposes to examine the fictions of two writers very directly concerned with evolution, but preferring what they took to be Erasmus Darwin’s version of it. The first of these is Samuel Butler, who progressed from sympathetically spoofing Charles’ evolutionism to bitterly attacking his theory of natural selection, holding up what he believed to be the goal-directed evolutionary model of Erasmus and others instead. Along with a glance at Butler’s polemical evolutionary works, his two major novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh are explored both for their critiques of Charles and the ways they may have drawn on Erasmus, particularly his Botanic Garden and Zoonomia. The other writer with links to Erasmus is George Bernard Shaw, the Preface to whose ambitious five-play cycle Back to Methuselah denounces Charles and explicitly praises both Butler and Erasmus’s Zoonomia, while its plot bears interesting similarities to Erasmus’s final evolutionary poem, The Temple of Nature. Since it is not certain Shaw had read this poem the following comparison runs the unproved possibility of direct influence in parallel with Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of the transmission of literary forms in a series of “knight’s moves,” “discontinuous but teleological” as Fredric Jameson calls them. While the parallels between the two works are striking, including the political contexts to which they are responding, the article finally distances Erasmus’s full-blooded but non-exclusory evolutionism from the hints of “survival of the fittest” Social-Darwinism to be found in Shaw’s (and to a lesser extent Butler’s) works.

Erewhon: Filming nowhere

Photographer Gavin Hipkins’ first feature film draws upon Samuel Butler’s anonymously published utopian satire Erewhon: Or, Over the Range (1872). It pairs a stream of evocative images with a voiceover narration from Butler’s text. In particular, it is in his exploration of Butler’s critique of the coming dominance of the machine in a post-industrial society that Hipkins’ film speaks to postcolonial New Zealand. Paradoxically, however, Hipkins employs the words of Butler’s text to free himself from the tyranny of narration and produce a film of continual interruptions, juxtapositions and breaks in perspective and mood. One moment we are asked to respond to the sublime grandeur of the New Zealand bush or mountainscape, the next to the banality of a rusted dripping pipe or a collection of car carcasses. Hipkins’ images acquire their power not because of their inherent qualities, but because they prove themselves to be transformable, that is, because they can enter into relations of composition with other images. Through its montage, Hipkins’ ‘cinema of thinking’ successfully combines the documentary nature of film—its recording—with its symbolic, evocative, ruminative capabilities, thus exemplifying Jean-Luc Godard’s dictum that all good fictions are documentaries and all good documentaries are fictions.

'A vehicle of symbols and nothing more'. George Romanes, theory of mind, information, and Samuel Butler.

Today's 'theory of mind' (ToM) concept is rooted in the distinction of nineteenth-century philosopher William Clifford between 'objects' that can be directly perceived and 'ejects', such as the mind of another person, which are inferred from one's subjective knowledge of one's own mind. George Romanes, a founder with Charles Darwin of the discipline of comparative psychology, considered the minds of animals as ejects, an idea that could be generalized to 'society as eject' and, ultimately, 'the world as an eject' - mind in the universe. Yet, Romanes and Clifford only vaguely connected mind with the abstraction we call 'information', which needs 'a vehicle of symbols' - a material transporting medium. However, Samuel Butler was able to address, in informational terms depleted of theological trappings, both organic evolution and mind in the universe. This view harmonizes with insights arising from modern DNA research, the relative immortality of 'selfish' genes, and some startling recent developments in brain research.

Wittgenstein’s Certainty is Uncertain: Brain Scans of Cured Hydrocephalics Challenge Cherished Assumptions

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein chose as his prime exemplar of certainty the fact that the skulls of normal people are filled with neural tissue, not sawdust. In 1980 the British pediatrician John Lorber reported that some normal adults, apparently cured of childhood hydrocephaly, had no more than 5 % of the volume of normal brain tissue. While initially disbelieved, Lorber's observations have since been independently confirmed by clinicians in France and Brazil. Thus Wittgenstein's cer- tainty has become uncertain. Furthermore, the paradox that the human brain's information content (memory) appears to exceed the storage capacity of even normal-sized brains, requires resolution. This article is one of a series on dis- parities between brain size and its assumed information content, as seen in cases of savant syndrome, micro- cephaly, and hydrocephaly, and with special reference to the Victorian era views of Conan Doyle, Samuel Butler, and Darwin's research associate, George Romanes. The articles argue that, albeit unlikely, the scope of explana- tions must not exclude extracorporeal information storage.

Darbishire expands his vision of heredity from Mendelian genetics to inherited memory

The British biologist A.D. Darbishire (1879–1915) responded to the rediscovery in 1900 of Mendel's theory of heredity by testing it experimentally, first in Oxford, then in Manchester and London. He summarised his conclusions in a textbook ‘Breeding and the Mendelian Discovery' (1911), in which he questioned whether Mendelism alone could explain all aspects of practical breeding experience. Already he had begun to think about an alternative theory to give greater emphasis to the widely held conviction among breeders regarding the inheritance of characteristics acquired during an individual's life. Redefining heredity in terms of a germ-plasm based biological memory, he used vocabulary drawn partly from sources outside conventional science, including the metaphysical/vitalistic writings of Samuel Butler and Henri Bergson. An evolving hereditary memory fitted well with the conception of breeding as a creative art aimed at greater economic efficiency. For evolution beyond human control he proposed a self-modifying process, claiming it to surpass in efficiency the chancy mechanism of natural selection proposed by Darwin. From his writings, including early chapters of an unfinished book entitled ‘An Introduction to a Biology’, we consider how he reached these concepts and how they relate to later advances in understanding the genome and the genetic programme.

John Aubrey’s Brief Lives: the edition we have been waiting for

Brief Lives is undoubtedly John Aubrey's most significant work. It is for this that he has become widely known in modern times - and deservedly so, since through it we gain an insight into his era that is quite simply unparalleled. Indeed, work is without compare not only in Aubrey's own period in any other, and it has been acclaimed accordingly. As novelist, Anthony Powell, whose John Aubrey and His Friends (1948) remains definitive biography of Aubrey, put it:To question, What are English like? worse answers might be given than: Read Aubrey's Lives and you will see; for there, loosely woven together, is a kind of tapestry of good and evil; ingenuity and folly; integrity and hypocrisy; eccentricity, melancholy, and greatness of English race.1In view of another commentator, Lytton Strachey:A biography should either be as long as Boswell 's or as short as Aubrey 's. The method of enormous and elaborate accretion which produced Life of Johnson is excellent, no doubt; but, failing that, let us have no half-measures; let us have pure essentials - a vivid image, on a page or two, without explanations, transitions, commentaries, or padding. This is what Aubrey gives us.2Such adulation of Brief Lives does not mean, of course, that Aubrey lacks significance in other respects, not least as a pioneer of modern archaeology, as has been argued perhaps most forcibly by Alain Schnapp.3 Aubrey's Monumenta Britannica was first English book that can be described as archaeological in a modern sense, bringing together unwritten, tangible relics of past so that they acquired a significance in their own right as subject of comparative study, rather than merely forming appendages to narratives based on written sources that preoccupied his antiquarian contemporaries. Aubrey's novel, technologically oriented view of past was a kind of backward extension of his involvement in science in context of early Royal Society, including a heady optimism about potential for intellectual progress, and this aspect of him, too, has attracted attention in recent years.4 was also a pioneer in other fields, not least in study of folklore and in analysis of place-names and other relics of linguistic change, from which he realized that more significant conclusions might be drawn than had previously been realized.5 In addition, he wrote books on various other subjects, including An Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen, which is full of shrewd advice based on his own and others' experience; a comedy, The Countrey Revell, which he addressed to dramatist, Thomas Shadwell; and collections on natural history, topography, astrology and architecture. was a true virtuoso.Yet Brief Lives transcends all these other works, which to some extent it encapsulates through range of people and topics that Aubrey thought it appropriate to memorialize. Not only does it reflect wide range of interests seen in his other writings; in addition, details that Aubrey gives of people who appear in it display same vivid, tactile quality that is reflected in his antiquarian writings. described divine, John Tombes, for instance, as but a little man, neat limbed, a little quick searching Eie, sad gray, while of Samuel Butler, author of Hudibras, he wrote: He is of a middle stature, strong sett, high coloured a kind of Sorrell haire. a severe and sound judgement. a good fellowe.6 Brief Lives can also be seen to reflect Aubrey's social role and his relations with his milieu, as Kate Bennett brilliantly illustrates in lengthy introduction to her new edition of work. For one thing, social institutions of Restoration London, and particularly coffee-houses that had proliferated since mid-seventeenth century, provided unprecedented opportunities for social interchange. Aubrey himself was acutely aware of the moderne advantage of Coffee-howses in this great Citie; before which, men knew not how to be acquainted, with their owne Relations, or Societies. …

Writing the scientific self: Samuel Butler and Charles Hoy Fort

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) and Charles Fort (1874-1932) were both scientific outsiders of the turn of the twentieth century, critiquing orthodox science whilst attempting to participate in it. Both of them also wrote experimental and innovative autobiographies (1884 and c. 1899-1904 respectively), challenging in their narrative form. Their self-construction in relation to science, it is argued, was effected through these autobiographies. The texts are considered here on multiple levels: in their own right; intertextually with their authors’ other writings; and paratextually with their authors’ lives. This essay builds upon Sally Shuttleworth’s observation that the projects of autobiography and science, in Butler’s oeuvre, are both about ‘the difficulties of defining or maintaining … selfhood’, and extends it to Fort’s case. This selfhood, it is argued, was for both Butler and Fort articulated through the same scientific model: orthogenesis – the pre-ordained unfolding of evolutionary fate. Orthogenesis was for both men a way of accounting for the transformation of self into writer; whilst it was already-being a writer, in having produced an autobiography, that enabled the leap-frogging of orthogenetic inheritance – both blood and money – into a new selfhood. As such, the autobiographies of Butler and Fort are an abductive and symbiotic plotting of science and self. The science and the self, qua practitioner and exemplar of science, are mutually affirming. The closure of autobiography – the final plotting – is done differently in each case, although open-endedness – a refusal to commit – is central to both. For Butler, the transformation is pushed forward into a future-judged authorial self, re-embodied as a textual self. For Fort, things are less clear and the uncertain ending is projected into the cosmos of his later works.

Review of Will Abberley’s “‘His father’s voice’: Phonographs and Heredity in the Fiction of Samuel Butler”

Review of Will Abberley’s “‘His father’s voice’: Phonographs and Heredity in the Fiction of Samuel Butler”

Reporting the Crimean War: Misinformation and Misinterpretation

There is probably no important event in times past whose historiography is free from misinformation, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or mistakes; and in this regard the Crimean War is no exception to this rule. The misinformation quoted in this article can be placed in at least one of four principal categories. The first involved either the failure to seek out primary sources for the correct information, or a demonstration of ignorance of military protocol, or the misrepresentation of data which in itself is not necessarily inaccurate. The three other examples are characterized by Samuel Butler’s bon mots that ‘though God cannot alter the past, historians can’. The first of these involved flights of fancy that are clearly absurd; the second comprises unkind and sometimes malicious remarks made without any reference to contemporary documents or reliable secondary sources that might support the assertions made; while the third, and possibly the most serious, was the seemingly deliberate falsification of the facts. The purpose of this article is to provide a selection of the many available examples of these misrepresentations which relate to the medical aspects of the Crimean campaign and to provide responses that hopefully go someway to setting the record straight.

From Colonial Animal to Imperial Edible

During the nineteenth century, efforts to feed Britain’s growing industrial and urban population enrolled vast swaths of the Southern Hemisphere in producing meat for British tables. This system relied on refrigerated shipping and was concurrent with efforts to improve and regulate the conditions of slaughter within Great Britain, in which the act of killing receded from public view. Drawing on the satirical fiction of Samuel Butler and the work of anthropologist Noelie Vialles, Woods’s article argues that the relocation of part of the work of raising and rendering sheep for consumption in Britain extended a general distancing of live animal and dead meat on an imperial scale. The outcome of this was not only economic and ecological change throughout much of the Southern Hemisphere, but also the reformulation of colonial flocks to suit the new trade in frozen meat.

Cuckoldry, Impotence and Adultery in Europe (15th–17th Century) ed. by Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (review)

Reviewed by: Cuckoldry, Impotence and Adultery in Europe (15th–17th Century) ed. by Sara F. Matthews-Grieco Frank Swannack Matthews-Grieco, Sara F., ed., Cuckoldry, Impotence and Adultery in Europe (15th–17th Century) (Visual Culture in Early Modernity), Farnham, Ashgate, 2014; hardback; pp. 326; 12 colour, 48 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £70.00; ISBN 9781472414397. The volume challenges the notion that the transgressive nature of early modern sexual culture is self-evident. In Part I, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio follows the controversial life of the Florentine Grand Duchess Bianca Cappello. She examines Bianca’s relationship – despite being married to Piero Buonaventuri – with long-standing lover Francesco de’ Medici. Interestingly, Piero was a willing cuckold or wittol having been given a job by Francesco to support Bianca, while also being a philanderer himself. Musacchio unpacks the ensuing complexity through popular Florentine conceptions of adultery, cuckoldry, and house scorning. Molly Bourne investigates the accusations of impotency against Vincenzo Gonzaga. Early modern physicians tested his virility with the ‘trifold operation of erection, penetration and ejaculation’ (p. 41). Bourne’s fascinating essay identifies how a prince’s sexual performance becomes a state concern. M. A. Katritzky examines the skimmington or social shaming ritual in Samuel Butler’s three-part poem Hudibras (1664). Through magical impotence, Sir Hudibras is targeted by skimmingtons enabling Katritzky to discuss popular seventeenth-century shaming methods. Furthermore, the close association between impotency and cuckoldry emphasises how ‘skimmingtons publicly humiliate weak husbands no less than dominant wives’ (p. 73). Katritzky concludes a stimulating essay by stating how Butler’s poem serves as a social and political satire. Part II begins with Matteo Duni examining how impotency in the Renaissance could be explained by many widespread causes depending on circumstances. In a critical overview, Duni discusses bad humours, satanic intervention, magic spells, inexperienced youth, and marital incompatibility. Laura Giannetti analyses food recipes that invigorate sexual performance. With the subtitle ‘Renaissance Viagra’, Giannetti investigates the popular sixteenth-century comic trope of an old man falling for a young woman, in particular, the old man’s search for a sexually charged potion. Through a fascinating examination of the enhancing qualities of plants, vegetables, spices, seeds, and fowl, Giannetti unpacks Renaissance anxieties over procreation and old age. Meredith K. Ray critiques sixteenth-century Italian books of [End Page 335] secrets or alchemic sexual remedies. She investigates tests for female virginity and increasing male potency that protected men from cuckoldry. The essays in Part III analyse visual representations of cuckolds in early modern art with numerous paintings and drawings being reproduced in the book. Francesca Alberti examines Christian tradition and classical mythology in European art by comparing two husbands: Joseph and Vulcan. Both husbands are old with young wives to imply they are cuckolds. Alberti’s detailed examination of the visual imagery featuring the two husbands finds an artistic obsession with the cuckold. Christiane Andersson examines portrayals of cuckolds associated with impotency in early sixteenth-century northern Swiss art. Andersson focuses on two Swiss artists, Niklaus Manuel and Urs Graf, both of whom served as mercenary soldiers. Their drawings depicted mercenaries made vulnerable by military service and their domineering women. In great detail, Andersson studies the bestial imagery associated with cuckoldry, and how men became sex slaves to promiscuous women. In an entertaining and thought-provoking essay, Louise Rice critiques the comic drawings of the early seventeenth-century Florentine painter Baccio del Bianco. The rich visual style of Baccio’s artwork pervades every popular facet of cuckoldry in literary and visual culture. Rice finds every kind of horn associated with cuckoldry including a snail’s. In addition, she surmises from Baccio’s black chalk drawings that becco, the Italian for goat and cuckold, also refers to a bird’s beak as a ‘pecker’. Cuckoldry and its various associations became a potent comic force in Baccio’s prurient imagination. The editor, Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, ends the volume with seventeenth-century Parisian print culture’s unprecedented social and commercial interest in cuckoldry. Her insightful study focuses on print culture as a primary source. Matthews-Grieco discovers marital conflict and unsociable behaviour, such as defecation and drunkenness, ripe for social satire. More seriously, the Parisian prints convey...

Politics , Ethics , and Aesthetics in Erewhon : Samuel Butler's Ambiguous Utopia

This article seeks to analyse Samuel Butler’s satirical treatment of Victorian institutions and values in Erewhon (1872). It focuses on the function of the utopian genre to account for the ideological struggles that inform society, and its capacity to suggest cures to social ills.

Unearthing the Entitled: 1 Kings, Douay-Rheims, and Samuel Butler's THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

As many scholars have noted, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh is preoccupied with the authenticity of genealogical records. Through epithets, letters, newspapers, and its own meta-role as manus...

Dilemmas and Delusions Bernard Shaw and Health

Beguiling a Victorian public obsessed with the pursuit of fitness, the International Health Exhibition opened in South Kensington in May 1884. Its expressed intent, to educate the public on a broad range of wellness topics, was greatly overshadowed by its dazzling display of proprietary medical commodities, salutary appliances, and faddish cures. While there were legitimate exhibits that dealt sincerely with issues of sanitation, hygiene, food, drink, and even child care, the event illuminated the extent to which personal and systemic therapeutic remedy and indeed health itself had become a lucrative industry. Less than three weeks before he joined the Fabian Society, the fledgling novelist Bernard Shaw visited one of the exhibition’s prominent attractions, Francis Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory, to be quantified and measured. Chart 3655, created on 16 August 1884, contains the following collected data:

An Imperfect Butlerite Aging and Embodiment in Back to Methuselah

ABSTRACT: This article traces Shaw's modifications of Samuel Butler's evolutionary theory, demonstrating that Shaw diverged significantly from the thinking of the author he credited as his inspiration. The difference between Shaw and Butler emerges from opposed understandings of the role of embodiment—a condition that Shaw's play cycle Back to Methuselah seeks to transcend altogether.

The Machinate Literary Animal: Butlerian Science for the Twenty-first Century

Current inquiry into nongenetic forms of inheritance has deep roots in the nineteenth century. Samuel Butler’s evolutionary science writing and fiction points ahead, beyond the twentieth-century dismissal of pre-Darwinian science, to our own questions about how the experiences of an individual organism may effect change at the species level. This includes the way that symbolically mediated information, which rapidly shapes the human environment, exercises a downward pressure on slower-moving, genetic change. Butler’s theories of unconscious memory and extended cognition, along with the Lamarckian principle that acquired traits could be passed on to descendants, together constituted an “evo-devo” approach to species history. In particular, language—specifically literary language—for Butler functioned as a machinate extension of the mind that could communicate transformative information to successive generations. Such extension therefore enables the little events of a lifetime to reach into the evolutionary future and transform it.

‘His father’s voice’: Phonographs and Heredity in the Fiction of Samuel Butler

The article explores the interaction between concepts of heredity and technologies of voice recording and reproduction in the late-Victorian imagination through the example of Samuel Butler. Butler’s writing on evolutionary topics frequently conceptualized heredity as a record of ancestral voices echoing through their descendants. His Lamarckian view of evolution caused him to present heredity as analogous to the phonograph, recording the experiences of individuals, storing them in the germ plasm and reproducing them in the offspring. Theorists of hereditary memory such as Ewald Hering described it as a form of vibration and inscription, emphasizing its parallels with phonography. At the same time, language and the physical voice seemed equally haunted for Butler, resonating with the thoughts, feelings, and urges of past generations. I pursue these themes through a close reading of his posthumously published novel The Way of All Flesh (1903). Butler makes an interesting case study for this subject since his ideas about the inheritance of ancestral voices were inseparable from his complex personal relations with his family. His efforts to escape the influence of his parents were bound up with the notion of escaping the habitual ‘grooves’ in which they lived, thought, and spoke. Such escape sometimes seems impossible in Butler’s vision, with long-term heredity and immediate social convention rendering people echoes of their predecessors. However, the life experience of the individual offered possibilities for breaking with the voices of the past, etching new grooves of habit and redirecting old ones. Further, heredity in Butler’s vision was not a single, commanding voice but a cacophony of competing voices screaming to be heard. In this sense, what seemed like rebellion against the voice of one’s ancestor might turn out to be obedience towards another one. Butler conceived of intellectual influence in the same way, placing thinkers and writers in a pseudo-familial (and perhaps proto-Freudian) relationship with their predecessors. His concern with escaping ancestral voices existed in tension, though, with his desire to render his own voice immortal through his literary work.

Anthony Welch The Renaissance Epic and the Oral PastThe Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past. Anthony Welch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. v+260.

<i>Anthony Welch</i> The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past<i>The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past</i>. Anthony Welch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. v+260.

Chicken Embryos, Headless Frogs, and the Victorian Human–Animal Divide: Samuel Butler's Animal Epistemology

One review of Samuel Butler's Life and Habit (1878) is more appreciative of Butler's aims to introduce teleology into the theory of evolution than were most contemporary commentaries. While this an...

Figures of Nineteenth-Century Biopower in Samuel Butler's Erewhon

Given its nearly reversed title and antipodean origins, critics sometimes refer to Erewhon as a “back-to-front” text; however, Butler's satire is less a tale of reversals than of ideological contra...