Book Review: Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited

Title: Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited

(Newer reprints are available at a lower price. This is the edition I physically own; unless you pay more for this specific edition, you'll get a newer book, probably with a more colorful cover.)

Author: Samuel L. Butler

Date: 1872

Publisher: Dent (1872); Everyman’s Library (reprint, 1932)

ISBN: none

Length: 389 pages

Quote: “[I]f a man falls into ill health, or catches any disorder, or fails bodily in any way before he is seventy years old, he is tried before a jury, and sentenced...But...bad conduct, though considered no less deplorable than illness with ourselves...is nevertheless held to be the result of...misfortune.”

Erewhon is Nowhere, respelled: a fictional country invented for the purpose of satirizing Victorian England. Butler believed in an ideal of human evolution, rather than in any traditional religion, and apparently imagined Erewhon to be a sort of argument illustrating his ideas. Let’s just say that as a satire Erewhon is less true, and thus less effective and less funny, than Gulliver’s Travels or Utopia. It could easily be of Butler and Erewhon that the song, “He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land,” was written; “making all his nowhere plans for nobody.”

Such literary merit as Erewhon was thought to have, in 1932, came from its subtle rebellion against mainstream thought. The plot is that an Englishman wander into Erewhon, observes its quaint customs, and leaves it (in a balloon, smuggling a female resident in the box). In Erewhon Revisited his son returns to Erewhon and discovers that his parents have been deified—by people hoping to make a profit off a new religious cult.

Erewhonians are backward in other ways besides their opinions on illness and misbehavior. They believe they age backward and have yet to be “born” into a more interesting life, making Erewhon the “Kingdom of the Unborn.” They have “Colleges of Unreason” that study, in euphemistic terms, every kind of “mental indisposition” from “snappishness” to “kleptomania.” They also admire “physical excellence,” so when the English narrator feels attracted to an Erewhonian, despite hi lack of connections or profession, “my light hair was sufficient to make me an eligible match.” The only problem is that “whoever married into a family must marry the eldest daughter at that time unmarried.” He likes the younger daughter, she likes him, and another young man likes the older daughter. This provides his motive for doing something in Erewhon, namely eloping.

Since approximately the year 40 A.D. people have claimed that the Christian Gospel message is distorted, that the Jesus who cured people and preached the Golden Rule was not the same one who claimed to be the Son of God and/or died on the Cross. Butler, an unbeliever, overtly satirizes the apostolic church in his treatment of the cult of “the Sunchild.”

Of all the stories “of other worlds” that have been taken seriously in English literature, I rate Erewhon the lowest. It’s not as pretty as Narnia, not as logical as Flatland, not as funny as Wonderland, and not a real satire like any of Gulliver’s travels. What we have in this set of short novels is a man who knows his ideas wouldn’t sell if they were written out as plain philosophical arguments, spinning thin, dry, predictable fiction around them. Some people like Erewhon, though, and probably everyone should “go” there at least once. Butler’s ideas are neither very radical nor very rational but they are amusing enough that people refer back to them, and the student may want to know the story behind the references.

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