BUTLER, SAMUEL (junior). — English writer, born on 4 December 1835 at Langar (Bingham), died there on 18 June 1902. The grandson and son of Anglican clergymen, he was directed toward an ecclesiastical career, which he soon abandoned following doubts about the faith; he then attempted to become a painter, but, hindered by his family, emigrated to the Nuova Zelanda to raise sheep. In 1864 he returned to England, where he resumed his activity as a painter and began his critical and literary work. He violently attacked all the principles of Victorian society: religion, morality, traditions, and sentiments.
His major work is Erewhon (1872), an anagram of Nowhere, a utopia that does not depict a better world but presents, in distorted and mocking form, an image of this one. Religious institutions, mechanical progress, and Darwinian theories are satirized in II. The posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) is a ferocious indictment of the family institution and the ecclesiastical milieu in which the author spent his youth. The result of his annual journeys in Italy is the collection of impressions Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and Canton Ticino (1881). B.’s style is stark, just as caustic as his thought. B. Shaw derived many ideas for his theatre from him.