The Way of All Flesh cover art

The Way of All Flesh

Preview
Prime Member Exclusive

3 Months Free

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Get this deal
Offer ends on 15 July 2026 at 11:59 BST.
More purchase options

The Way of All Flesh

By: Samuel Butler
Narrated by: Antony Ferguson
Get this deal

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £15.40

Buy Now for £15.40

"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 rancor, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations. The Way of All Flesh tells the story of Ernest Pontifex and his struggles with Victorian mores, his restrictive, highly religious family, and Victorian society itself. Butler is remembered as one of the greatest of the anti-Victorians, whose ideas reflected accurately the new, more liberal society that was to come following the death of England's great queen, and the beginning of a new era.

Public Domain (P)2010 Tantor
Classics Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c
All stars
Most relevant
When it comes to Victorian writers, Samuel Butler's is a unique voice. The Way of All Flesh is a telling account of middle class family life in a religious household where self-righteous hypocrisy serves adult desires even while it functions to blight the lives of successive generations. So glad to find this on Audible - a great book, very read well by Antony Ferguson.

.... fascinating and unusual Victorian novel

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.