Samuel Butler emerges here as a fiercely original thinker whose essays on Homer, art, science, and life are gathered with a fresh biographical sketch by Henry Festing Jones. The volume presents "The Humour of Homer" as both a lecture and a key to Butler's larger argument: ancient texts should be read as living human documents, not dead relics, a view that helped provoke academic resistance to his ideas. It also places his other essays within the wider pattern of his thought, from composition and clarity to biology, evolution, and artistic practice. Jones's life sketch follows Butler from his Nottinghamshire birth and Italian childhood to Allesley, Shrewsbury, and Cambridge, where Handel's music became a lifelong passion and his wit, skepticism, and love of plain speech took shape. After a crisis of faith and refusal of the clergy, he emigrated to New Zealand, built the remote sheep run of Mesopotamia, and discovered in hardship a proving ground for endurance and observation. Returning to England, he turned to Darwin, anonymous evolutionary essays, painting, and a disciplined, solitary life of work and conviction. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Butler, Samuel

Samuel Butler was an English writer, critic, and iconoclast whose life moved restlessly between the expectations of Victorian respectability and a fierce determination to think for himself. Born in 1835 into a strict clerical family, he trained for the church, emigrated to New Zealand to try sheep farming, and later settled in London, where he built a reputation as a novelist, essayist, translator, and sharp-minded cultural critic. His literary career was marked by bold originality and an appetite for argument: he satirized Victorian society, questioned religious orthodoxy, and brought a skeptical, humorous intelligence to subjects ranging from art and music to science, evolution, and classical literature. He is especially remembered for his novels and for essays that combine wit with restless inquiry, revealing a mind unwilling to accept inherited ideas simply because they were inherited. Butler’s work often turns on themes that still feel urgent today: the tension between individual freedom and social conformity, the dangers of dogma, the comic absurdity of human self-importance, and the way institutions can stifle honest thought. His reflections on Homer and other literary subjects show his gift for making old texts feel alive, accessible, and freshly contested. For modern readers, Butler remains significant because he embodies the value of intelligent dissent; he invites us to question received wisdom without losing our sense of humor. Readers who enjoy satirical fiction, provocative essays, classical literature, and writers who challenge convention will find him especially rewarding.