Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler was born in 1835 in Langar, Nottinghamshire, into a family of clergymen. His grandfather was a bishop and his father a rector, and Butler was expected to follow them into the church. Instead, after graduating from Cambridge, he refused ordination and emigrated to New Zealand, where he ran a sheep station and doubled his investment in five years. He returned to England in 1864 and settled in London, where he lived for the rest of his life on a modest income, devoting himself to painting, music, writing, and a series of idiosyncratic intellectual pursuits that ranged from Homeric scholarship to evolutionary theory. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by The Way of All Flesh.