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The Way of All Flesh

Samuel Butler - Author

James Cochrane - Editor

Richard Hoggart - Introduction by

Paperback | $14.00 | add to cart | view cart
ISBN 9780140430127 | 448 pages | 30 Aug 1966 | Penguin Classics | 5.07 x 7.79in | 18 - AND UP
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'I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.' With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth 'in the bosom of a Christian family'. With irony, wit and sometimes rancour, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations.
'The Way of All Flesh blows a refreshing wind of ironic laughter and caricature through some rooms of the mind that had become very musty indeed. It shows that fascinating interplay between art and the raw material of a man’s life.' - Richard Hoggart in the introduction.