Erewhon

Af: Samuel Butler

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A young traveller sets out to make his fortune and discovers the idyllic distant land of Erewhon. Its people welcome him with open arms, but this apparent utopia soon reveals its darker side.

In Erewhon, money has no value and disease is a crime, yet poverty is punishable and criminals are cared for as though sick. How can he survive in a land where morality makes no sense?

‘Erewhon’ is Samuel Butler’s classic utopian satire about the hypocrisy of religion and Victorian society. Influenced by Darwin’s recently published ‘On the Origin of Species’, it is most famous for its ground-breaking idea of ‘mechanical consciousness’. In 1901, Butler published a sequel entitled ‘Erewhon Revisited’. Both books are perfect for fans of ‘Gulliver’s Travels.’ Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was a revolutionary English novelist and critic. He is best known for the utopian novel ‘Erewhon’ (1872) and the posthumous, semi-autobiographical novel ‘The Way of All Flesh’ (1903). Both of which have remained in print ever since. ‘Erewhon’ is renowned as one of the first books to explore the idea of machine evolution and the writer Aldous Huxley acknowledged its influence on his novel ‘Brave New World.' George Bernard Shaw deemed Butler ‘the greatest English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century.’

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