The way of all flesh

By Samuel Butler

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

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.