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Some Notes on Memory

samuel butler (1835–1902) was an English writer of satiric disposition who produced a remarkable variety of works of fiction and nonfiction, as well as poems, translations, paintings, photographs, and musical compositions. Now best known as the author of The Way of All Flesh, an autobiographical novel published posthumously, he was born in Nottinghamshire, the son and grandson of Anglican clergymen. After he received first-class honors in classics at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1858, his intention was to follow family tradition and enter the clergy, but he was beset by doubts and decided that it would be inappropriate for him to pursue ordination. After extensive discussions with his family, he was given a sum of money to make his own way and in 1864 emigrated to New Zealand, where he remained for five years, achieving significant financial success as a sheep rancher. During that time, he encountered Darwin’s Origin of Species, and he began a series of articles elaborating upon what he understood to be the far-reaching implications of evolutionary theory. Butler returned to England in 1864 and took up training in art, but ultimately concluded that his talents as a painter were unequal to his ambitions. Turning again to writing, he published his first major satire, Erewhon; or, Over the Range, anonymously in 1872; this work was followed the next year by another anonymous publication, The Fair Haven, a subtly subversive treatment of the miraculous dimensions of Christian belief. Butler began the writing of The Way of All Flesh in the early 1870s, but he ceased work on it in 1884, recognizing that it would constitute a serious offense to his family. In the years that followed, he published a series of studies exploring the ways in which unconscious memory and the inheritance of biological traits might be connected: Life and Habit (1878), Evolution, Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification? (1886). Butler published translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and he continued to provoke controversy with such works as The Authoress of The Odyssey (1897) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered, and In Part Rearranged (1899). Erewhon Revisited appeared in 1901. When it was finally published in 1903, a year after Butler’s death, The Way of All Flesh established his reputation as a writer whose unyielding independence had enabled him to overcome Victorian pretensions and to open up the moral and intellectual space needed to construct what was imagined to be a preferable future. Among those for whom his works counted most were James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The pages below are taken from The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, edited and with an introduction by his close friend Henry Festing-Jones, and first published in London by A. C. Fifield in 1912.