This book is first an essay in reassessment and rediscovery: there has been no rigorously comprehensive study of Butler in over a generation. It is also an essay in comparative criticism, which places Butler between his early twentieth-century heirs and his eighteenth-century precursors. While Butler is remembered chiefly as a novelist, he defies generic classification. With a lucidity and elegance that singularly befit the author of The Way of All Flesh, Dr. Jeffers leads the reader to comprehend Butler in all his facets: as theologian, moralist, and educationist. Butler was a writer who, with remarkable success not only in the Pontifex saga and Erewhon, but also in The Fair Haven, Life and Habit, and The Notebooks, addressed himself to matters of enduring relevance. Butler has long been recognized as an early exponent of ideas which certain twentieth-century thinkers, from Bergson to Whitehead to Freud, either wittingly borrowed or unwittingly reconceived. This line of study has, however, given the unwarranted impression that Butler was a lonely seer, a studious eccentric who exhumed and galvanized the ideas of forgotten theorists like Lamarck and turned them against the deep-rooted intellectual establishment of the late Victorian Age. This is to mistake his social for his spiritual position. His writings teem with ideas which are continuous with pre-Victorian traditions of libertarianism in education, hedonism in ethics, and a half-pious, half-iconoclastic agnosticism in theology. Writers such as Locke, Hume, Dr. Johnson, Chesterfield, and Cobbett helped variously to create and apply the philosophical assumptions which Butler found at hand when he needed a grounding different from his father's Pauline Christianity and public school "hypothetics," just as he himself went on to develop assumptions which Shaw, Forster, Virginia Woolf, and others would have at hand in their different times of need.

Samuel Butler, Victorian against the Grain is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that provides a critical overview of Butler's career, one which places his multifaceted body of work within the cultural framework of the Victorian age.

In the wake of the 2009 Darwin bicentenary, Samuel Butler (1835-1902) is becoming as well known for his public attack on Darwin's character and the basis of his scientific authority as for his novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh. In the first monograph devoted to Butler's ideas for over twenty years, David Gillott offers a much-needed reappraisal of Butler's work and shows how Lamarckian ideas pervaded the whole of Butler's wide-ranging ouevre, and not merely his evolutionary theory. In particular, he argues that Lamarckism was the foundation on which Butler's attempt to undermine professional authority in a variety of disciplines was based. Samuel Butler against the Professionals provides new insight into a fascinating but often misunderstood writer, and on the surprisingly broad application of Lamarckian ideas in the decades following publication of the Origin of Species.

Part I of this authoritative handbook offers systematic essays, which deal with major historical, social, philosophical, political, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the English novel between 1830 and 1900. The essays offer a wide scope of aspects such as the Industrial Revolution, religion and secularisation, science, technology, medicine, evolution or the increasing mediatisation of the lifeworld. Part II, then, leads through the work of more than 25 eminent Victorian novelists. Each of these chapters provides both historical and biographical contextualisation, overview, close reading and analysis. They also encourage further research as they look upon the work of the respective authors at issue from the perspectives of cultural and literary theory.