The Way of All Flesh

Four generations of the Pontifex family, told by an old friend of the house who watched most of it happen. Old John the carpenter is content; his son George becomes a prosperous publisher and a domestic tyrant; George's son Theobald is bullied into the Church and into a marriage, and passes both the bullying and the piety on to his own son Ernest, whose slow, humiliating escape — through a disastrous curacy, a criminal charge, prison, a marriage that turns out to be no marriage at all, and a tailor's shop — is the spine of the book.

Samuel Butler worked on the novel between 1873 and 1884 and then put it away; it was published in 1903, the year after his death, by his literary executor. Its attack on Victorian family religion was too direct to print while the family it drew on was alive, and its reception helped turn the tide against the sentimental treatment of fathers and sons that had prevailed in the English novel.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.