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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. A novel of keen perceptions, The Way of All Flesh, as Richard Hoggart remarks in his Introduction, 'blows a refreshing wind of ironic laughter and caricature through some rooms of the mind that had become very musty indeed' and 'shows that fascinating interplay between art and the raw material of a man's life'.
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