The way of all flesh

By Samuel Butler

Subjects: Autobiographical fiction, England, fiction, Domestic fiction, Middl126e class, Parent and child, Fiction, general, English fiction, Children of clergy, Fiction, sagas, Large type books, Manners and customs, Conflict of generations in fiction, Middle class, Historical fiction, Fiction, Great britain, fiction, Children's fiction, Social life and customs, Parent and child, fiction, British and irish fiction (fictional works by one author), England in fiction, Middle class in fiction, Young men in fiction, Conflict of generations, Classic Literature, Children of clergy in fiction, Parent and child in fiction, Young men

Description: 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.