The Way of All Flesh

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) 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, and even, in his early years, a highly successful sheep farmer in New Zealand. He was also, as The Way of All Flesh, his deterministic tale of the havoc wrought by genetic inheritance, suggests, one of the great British masters of the novel of ideas.

P. N. Furbank is Emeritus Professor of the Open University and author of Samuel Butler: 1835-1902. Other publications include E. M. Forster: A Life; Italo Svevo: the Man and the Writer; Unholy Pleasure: the Idea of Social Class and, most recently, Diderot: A Critical Biography.