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"SAMUEL BUTLER (1835-1902), the freethinking iconoclast whom George Bernard Shaw deemed ""the greatest English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century,also satirized Victorian society in Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901). His work strongly influenced such writers as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce."
The childhood of Ernest Pontifex with his silly pretentious mother and ogre of a father would make painful reading but for the dry style in which the story is told, its wit and its author's perspicacity. As it is we marvel that 19th-century fathers beat the children they professed to love for no greater offence than lisping. We are shocked at the ignorance of the young in those days and the absolute authority of their elders, at injuries inflicted in the name of religion and draconian brutality mis-called duty. But for all that, The Way of All Flesh should be required reading for aspiring parents even today. Hypocrisy and humbug have not yet come to an end in our dealings with children. Review by Ruth Rendell, whose crime novels include 'The Keys to the Street' (Kirkus UK)
