Samuel Butler’s Erewhon took its place in an honored tradition as satire against what Butler perceived as the intellectual, emotional, and moral stagnation of English society and human nature in general. Revolting against the Victorian values that negatively affected English education, politics, and family life, Butler produced a philosophical novel that took those elements of his culture to task. Through the application of paradox, he made clear in this example of ironic utopian fiction, or a dystopia, his belief that his culture had failed its members in every way.
Erewhon, an anagram for “nowhere,” consisted of irreverent satire on Victorian society, religion, and morality, made up, in part, of articles by Butler that included “A First Year” and “Darwin Among the Machines” (1863); an 1865 revision and extension of “Darwin Among the Machines”; “The World of the Unborn” (1865); and “The Musical Banks” (1869). He had, in his words, “strung” those essays together, along with some additional material, at the suggestion of a friend.
In the novel, set in 1868 in an unidentified country whose geography resembles that of England, the protagonist, Higgs, discovers a country ruled by philosophers and prophets where morality equates to health and beauty while crime equates to illness. One Erewhonian court declares that the infliction of pain and suffering upon those who suffer represents the only way to control their disease. The new territory offers Higgs a skewed reflection of his own society. For instance, machines exist, but they are isolated in a museum, declared evil for their negative effects on human nature. Higgs enjoys a narrow escape from persecution for his possession of a watch; only his plea of ignorance regarding the cultural edict prohibiting machines saves him. A latter section of the work, “The Book of the Machines,” explains the philosophy. He remains imprisoned as an encroacher, rescued from harsh punishment due to his healthy appearance.
Higgs describes a socially unjust but civically acceptable attitude that clearly parodies the socially acceptable attitude of his own Victorian culture: self-respecting individuals would never relate to those less fortunate. Those of lower birth, with little money, good looks, and health, are to be disliked and viewed as objects of disgust, an approach “not only natural, but desirable for any society, whether of man or brute.” Misfortunes of birth or health receive much greater punishment than crime, as Butler illustrates through Higgs’s experiences.
His adventures include a house-arrest arrangement in which he lives with a family named Nosnibor, the reverse spelling of Robinson, suggestive, perhaps, of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). The Nosnibor patriarch had committed fraud. Rather than imprison the man for criminal behavior, the court severely restricts his diet and sentences him to weekly visits from a “straightener” who administers beatings. No one bears a grudge against Nosnibor for his misdeeds. Likewise, no respectable citizen will admit to enjoying anything less than perfect health. When a neighbor woman visits the Nosnibors without her husband, she does not say he could not accompany her due to ill health. Instead, she claims he had stolen a pair of socks in the town square. Higgs has learned the proper reaction, sympathy, and confesses his own recent temptation to steal a clothes brush.
The Victorian banking industry does not escape Butler’s attack, as he parodies its control of Victorian society by characterizing the banks, in which people make deposits that result in a worthless currency, as churches symbolic of organized religion. The grandiose structures contain enormous gardens filled with birds, stained-glass windows, and even a choir, although the music produced is intolerable “to a European ear.” When Higgs draws back a curtain to spy on the inner workings of the establishment, he is roundly corrected by a menacing guard dressed in black. Higgs explained the saving grace of the Musical Bank was, “while it bore witness to a kingdom that is not of this world, it made no attempt to pierce the veil that hides it from human eyes,” an approach other religions might do well to imitate.
Higgs engages in various discussions with Professors of Unreason, faculty from the local educational institution, that allow Butler to also attack Victorian philosophy. After Higgs contracts measles, he learns he will be prosecuted ostensibly for that illness, but in reality for his attempts to reintroduce machines into the society through his watch. He escapes in a hot-air balloon with an Erewhonian native, Arowhena, to avoid prosecution.
The public received Erewhon well, with the first edition selling out in three weeks. Many readers believed the novel to be anti-Darwinian, critical of the idea of “thinking” machines. However, later critics countered that claim, declaring Butler an accurate predictor of the future and a man who believed in the advancement of civilization through proper use of technology.
Considered a forerunner of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Erewhon occupies an important position in science fiction literature. In 1901, Butler published, with the help of George Bernard Shaw, Erewhon Revisited, in which the son of Higgs and Arowhena tells of Higgs’s further adventures in Erewhon 20 years following his escape. Erewhon remains available in electronic text versions.
Bibliography
Beach, Joseph Warren. English Literature of the Nineteenth and the Early Twentieth Centuries: 1798 to the First World War. New York: Collier Books, 1966.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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