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Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Victorian satirist, critic, and visual artist, possessed one of the most original and inquiring imaginations of his age. The author of two satires,Erewhon(1872) andThe Way of All Flesh(1903), Butler's intellectually adventurous explorations along the cultural frontiers of his time appeared in volume after eccentric volume. Author of four works on evolution, he was one of the most prolific evolutionary speculators of his time. He was an innovative travel writer and art historian who used the creative insights of his own painting, photography, and local knowledge to invent, in works likeAlps and Sanctuaries(1881), a vibrant Italian culture that contrasted with the spiritually frigid experience of his High Church upbringing. Despite his range and achievement, there remains surprisingly little contemporary analytical commentary on Butler's work.Samuel Butler, Victorian against the Grainis an interdisciplinary collection of essays that provides a critical overview of Butler's career, one which places his multifaceted body of work within the cultural framework of the Victorian age. The essays, taken together, discuss the formation of Victorian England's ultimate polymath, an artistic and intellectual ventriloquist who assumed an extraordinary range of roles - as satirist, novelist, evolutionist, natural theologian, travel writer, art historian, biographer, classicist, painter, and photographer.

In a Note-Book entry of 1899, ‘Analysis of the sales of my books,’ written toward the end of his career, Samuel Butler charted the evidence of his dwindling Victorian readership (NB 5:205).¹ As the list descends through fourteen works, all self-published between 1872 and 1898, the net losses mount, and Butler’s audience diminishes to zero. ‘It will be noted,’ he observes dryly, ‘that my public appears to be a declining one. I attribute this to the long course of practical boycott to which I have been subjected for so many years – or if not boycott – of sneer, snarl, and misrepresentation.