1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
Erewhon, Samuel Butler's seminal work, weaves a tapestry of dystopian satire, exploring themes of evolution, morality, and societal norms against the backdrop of a fictional utopia. With its inventive narrative style, the book employs a blend of philosophical discourse and engaging storytelling that critiques Victorian society. Butler's vivid imagination creates a world where machines evolve, and human society faces the ethical dilemmas brought forth by technological advancement, leading the reader to question not only the nature of humanity but also the future of progress itself. Samuel Butler, an iconoclastic figure in Victorian literature, was deeply influenced by his unorthodox views on Darwinism and industrialization. His experiences as a writer, artist, and social commentator informed the provocative ideas presented in Erewhon. Butler's own tensions with conventional religion and societal expectations pushed him to construct a narrative that defied the norms, echoing his personal journey of skepticism and inquiry into the essence of life and consciousness. Erewhon is a must-read for anyone interested in the philosophical underpinnings of modern society and the implications of technological growth. Butler's incisive wit and profound observations resonate powerfully today, making this work both timeless and relevant. Dive into this thought-provoking exploration of humanity and discover the intricate layers of a world that mirrors our own. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Ähnliche
EREWHON (Dystopian Classic)
Table of Contents
Introduction
By flipping familiar certainties about morality, health, crime, religion, and machines, this novel asks what we mean by progress, who authorizes it, and how a well-ordered society can normalize paradox, exposing the comfort of habit, the pressure of public opinion, and the slipperiness of reason, all while inviting readers to test their own convictions against an unfamiliar mirror whose distortions are calibrated to reveal rather than to mislead, so that every custom we take for granted becomes questionable, every institution contingent, and every innovation ambiguous, poised between liberation and control, in private life as much as in public policy.
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon was first published anonymously in 1872 and is commonly classed as a satirical utopia or early dystopia. It is set in a secluded country beyond a mountain range, encountered by an outsider who reports what he finds in the manner of a travel narrative. Written in the later Victorian period, the book uses the conventions of exploration and ethnography to examine institutions that echo, and critique, those of contemporary Britain. Its chapters move between narrative episodes and reflective essays, creating a hybrid form that lets Butler stage thought experiments about law, religion, education, economics, and technological change.
The premise is deliberately simple: a traveler crosses difficult terrain, reaches an unknown land, and tries to understand how it works. The account is calm, observant, and edged with irony, presenting customs without overt outrage so that the reader supplies the shock. In place of melodramatic conspiracy or sweeping battles, the interest lies in arguments, rules, ceremonies, and the way people justify them. The mood alternates between comic detachment and quiet unease, and the style favors clarity over ornament, making the book accessible while retaining a slow-burn strangeness that accumulates as each institution is described.
Much of the novel’s power comes from systematic inversions that make prevailing assumptions look arbitrary. Illness is treated as a fault demanding punishment, while certain crimes are pathologized as if they were symptoms to be managed. Financial and social standing take on quasi-theological weight, and education is scrutinized for the values it silently reproduces. These dislocations are not puzzles to be solved but frameworks for reflection. By presenting a society that is coherent on its own terms yet disconcerting to an outside observer, Butler asks readers to measure their own habits of judgment, compassion, shame, and respectability.
Equally striking are the chapters devoted to technology, which speculate about machines in an age shaped by steam power and new industrial rhythms. The narrator encounters arguments that imagine mechanical evolution and consider whether unchecked innovation might enslave its makers, anticipating questions that later science fiction would revisit. The tension is not merely fear of invention, but anxiety about dependence, delegation, and control. By placing these debates inside a fictional culture, Butler keeps the focus on ideas rather than futurist spectacle, encouraging readers to think about how tools reorganize labor, thought, responsibility, and the stories societies tell about progress.
Read today, the book’s concerns feel immediate. It probes how communities moralize misfortune, how public opinion disciplines dissent, and how institutions translate ethics into policy. Its reflections on machines resonate with debates about automation and intelligent systems, while its treatment of wealth, propriety, and punishment challenges easy alignments of virtue with success. The novel rewards patient attention more than plot-chasing, inviting comparison across eras without requiring specialized knowledge. For readers interested in the roots of dystopian and speculative traditions, it offers an early, searching example that aims less to predict the future than to estrange the present.
Approached as an introduction to a different way of seeing rather than as a puzzle-box of revelations, Erewhon provides a bracing, witty, and quietly disquieting journey. Butler’s method—observing, classifying, and holding competing claims in tension—makes the book both an entertaining travelogue and a provocation. It solicits curiosity rather than cynicism, asking how customs arise, why they persist, and what it would take to revise them. Whether read for its satire, its speculative audacity, or its historical vantage, this work remains a lucid companion for anyone interested in how societies define normality and how easily that definition can shift.
Synopsis
The narrator, a young English settler in a remote colony, hears rumors from local shepherds and a nervous native guide about a fertile land hidden beyond a forbidding mountain chain. Restless and curious, he prepares an expedition with simple provisions and the guide’s reluctant assistance. Stories of taboo peaks and uncanny inhabitants only sharpen his resolve to cross. The journey is presented as a practical venture rather than a heroic quest: a man with a map in his head, following rivers upstream, estimating passes, and balancing risk against dwindling supplies. The stage is set for a discovery born from persistence instead of legend.
The ascent brings glaciers, ravines, and near disaster. The guide turns back in fear, leaving the traveler to continue alone until a hard-won pass opens onto a secluded upland. Below lie cultivated terraces, herds, and orderly footpaths that signal an isolated yet advanced society. Locals approach with cautious curiosity and, after brief deliberation, escort him to a settlement. A small personal object, a watch, causes alarm, and officials treat it as an illicit device. Unable to communicate, he is confined while his belongings are examined. The tone shifts from travel narrative to study of contact, with the stranger under deliberate scrutiny.
In custody, the traveler slowly acquires the language and the etiquette of the people who call their country Erewhon. He moves from strict confinement to supervised hospitality within a respectable household, learning that decorum and appearance carry legal and moral weight. Household rituals, careful dress, and coded politeness determine status. He forms tentative friendships, including with a young woman whose family circumstances complicate social dealings, and meets professional straighteners, counselors who arbitrate conduct. Through these daily interactions, he begins to infer principles that upend his assumptions, preparing him, and the reader, for a social logic that treats custom as both compass and constraint.
Legal customs present the first major inversion. Physical illness, injury, and bodily weakness are treated as moral failings subject to prosecution and punishment, while actions typically considered crimes are reclassified as diseases requiring sympathetic treatment. Courts examine the culpability of sickness with the gravity of felony trials, whereas embezzlers may be sent to therapeutic institutions. The system aims to enforce reliability by redefining harm and responsibility. Observing these procedures, the narrator records cases, penalties, and public reasoning. The details introduce Erewhon’s guiding principle: social order rests on managing appearances, habits, and statistical expectations rather than on fixed notions of absolute guilt.
Religion takes an equally unconventional form. Erewhonians attend the ornate Musical Banks, where ceremony and choral splendor command reverence, yet these institutions seldom handle practical finance. Daily transactions rely on separate, less honored banks, producing a divide between professed faith and operative trust. Alongside this, the culture venerates Ydgrun, a personification of common opinion and propriety. Official doctrine and lived belief coexist without open conflict, reinforcing the authority of public decorum. The narrator charts these practices neutrally, noting how ritual, respectability, and convenience align. Through this double system, the society maintains cohesion: people honor symbols while conducting business by quietly different rules.
Education and philosophy further develop the theme. At the celebrated Colleges of Unreason, students specialize in hypothetics and ingenious abstractions prized more for intricacy than for utility. Subtle disputations and elegant paradoxes confer prestige, while practical skills are compartmentalized or discouraged. Family life and childrearing are managed with reformist zeal, and moral failings are addressed by straighteners who diagnose temperamental imbalances. Marriage, inheritance, and manners are standardized to minimize embarrassment. The visitor observes that such institutions, though peculiar, function coherently within their own assumptions, producing citizens adept at navigating convention and risk, even when the resulting expertise appears misapplied by external standards.
Technological policy forms a central debate. Influential writings known as the Book of the Machines argue that mechanical contrivances evolve through human selection and interdependence, potentially outstripping their makers. Accepting this logic, Erewhon restricts or abolishes complex machinery, favors handcraft, and scrutinizes devices for signs of dangerous autonomy. The traveler’s confiscated watch becomes emblematic of this anxiety. Discussions of fitness, means and ends, and tool-mediated power echo contemporary evolutionary thought while redirecting its implications. The society aims to preserve human faculties and social equilibrium by limiting acceleration, even at the cost of convenience and external competitiveness.
Economic and civic life proceed within these constraints. Property is respected, trade is lively, and reputation functions as capital, yet speculative ventures are hedged by fear of impropriety. Official and unofficial systems overlap: ceremonial institutions confer moral credit, while practical networks enable exchange. The visitor’s position grows more prominent and precarious as he gains patronage, teaches what he knows, and becomes entangled in expectations he cannot fully satisfy. Personal attachments deepen, but laws about foreignness, family ambition, and public perception shape what can be openly pursued. Subtle pressures accumulate, and he senses how easily favor can turn into sanction.
The narrative moves toward a decisive transition. Heightened scrutiny, unease about his origin, and conflicts over technology and propriety narrow the traveler’s options. He contemplates a path that would break the impasse, weighing gratitude for hospitality against the impossibility of full belonging. The closing movement reinforces the book’s central purpose: to examine familiar institutions by inverting them, testing ideas of progress, morality, and sanity through a self-consistent alternative. Without resolving every thread, the story presents Erewhon as a mirror that clarifies the reader’s own world, prompting reflection on how societies define virtue, risk, belief, and the proper uses of invention.
Historical Context
Although Erewhon is a fictional land, the novel situates its journey narrative squarely within the mid-nineteenth-century world of British colonial exploration. The nameless narrator, a sheep-farmer turned explorer, crosses a high mountain range into a secluded country whose glaciated valleys, braided rivers, and sudden alpine passes evoke New Zealand’s Southern Alps. The temporal frame aligns with the 1860s, the peak of Victorian expansion and scientific self-confidence. Erewhon’s social codes—laws against machines, the criminalization of illness, and ritualized banking—mirror metropolitan debates imported to colonial frontiers. Thus, the setting blends a recognizable colonial geography with an ethnographic satire that reflects the cultural and policy climate of the British Empire at the time of composition (published 1872).
The Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1840) transformed Britain through steam power, textile mechanization, and railway expansion, culminating in spectacles like the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park’s Crystal Palace, visited by roughly six million people. Resistance surfaced earlier in the Luddite risings (1811–1816), met by the Frame Breaking Act (1812). By the 1860s, rail mileage exceeded 13,000 in Britain, embedding machines in daily life. Erewhon’s famous anti-machine policy—rooted in a historical ban and destruction of complex devices—directly mirrors these debates. Butler converts industrial optimism and Luddite fear into a systematic legal prohibition, dramatizing anxieties about mechanization’s social and moral consequences at the very moment Britain celebrated technological dominion.
The Darwinian controversy defined the 1860s after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Thomas H. Huxley defended natural selection against Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at the Oxford debate on 30 June 1860; Herbert Spencer popularized “survival of the fittest” in 1864. Earlier natural theology (William Paley, 1802) and the Bridgewater Treatises (1833–1836) provided a contrasting design-based framework. Educated at Cambridge (1854–1858) and son of a clergyman, Butler knew these disputes intimately. Erewhon’s “Book of the Machines” extrapolates evolutionary logic to technology, satirically proposing that machines might outcompete humans. The novel thus refracts post-1859 arguments over agency, adaptation, and teleology into a speculative critique of scientific naturalism’s cultural reach.
Erewhon grows from the concrete setting of British settler colonialism in New Zealand. The Treaty of Waitangi (6 February 1840) inaugurated Crown sovereignty; conflicts known as the New Zealand Wars (1845–1872) marked contested land and authority. The Canterbury Association (founded 1848 by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and John Robert Godley) organized Anglican settlement; the “First Four Ships” reached Lyttelton in December 1850. Samuel Butler migrated to Canterbury in 1860, managed Mesopotamia Station near the Rangitata River, and traversed alpine country before returning to England in 1864. The narrator’s mountain crossing and pastoral background echo this milieu. By staging a “discovery” narrative, the book interrogates imperial ethnography and the settler’s presumption to legislate morality for a secluded people.
Mid-Victorian religious crises shaped public life. Essays and Reviews (1860) provoked outrage for advocating critical biblical scholarship; in 1862 the Court of Arches condemned two contributors (Rowland Williams, Henry Bristow Wilson), but the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council issued partial reversals in 1864. Across the empire, Bishop J. W. Colenso of Natal faced deposition proceedings (1863) for Pentateuchal criticism; imperial courts questioned the sentence’s validity by 1865. In Britain, the Irish Church Act (1869) disestablished the Church of Ireland, signaling shrinking state-church fusion. Erewhon’s “Musical Banks,” issuing morally potent but practically useless tokens, satirizes establishment religion’s ceremonial authority alongside a separate, secular economy, reflecting those high-profile clashes over doctrine, legitimacy, and public influence.
Victorian governance increasingly targeted bodies and environments. The Public Health Act (1848), expanded after cholera outbreaks (notably 1854 and 1866), pioneered sanitary administration. The Vaccination Acts (1853, 1867) mandated infant smallpox inoculation, inciting organized opposition (National Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, 1866). The Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) policed venereal disease around garrisons, provoking the Ladies’ National Association campaign led by Josephine Butler and culminating in repeal (1886). Simultaneously, the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) and workhouse regime moralized poverty. Erewhon’s inversion—illness treated as crime, crime as disease—condenses these policies’ moral surveillance into a juridical absurdity, exposing how Victorian administrations conflated health, virtue, and social order through coercive regulation.
Financial capitalism’s booms and crises framed mid-century risk. Railway Mania (c. 1845–1847) epitomized speculative exuberance; the collapse of Overend, Gurney & Co. on 10 May 1866 triggered a London panic that tested the Bank of England’s lender-of-last-resort role, later theorized by Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street (1873). Joint-stock banking expanded credit while Victorian “respectability” furnished moral cover for speculation. Erewhon’s twinned monetary systems—the performative, ceremonious “Musical Banks” versus the practical, unacknowledged circulation—mirror the split between moral capital and cash capital in London’s markets. The novel thus translates the opacity of mid-century credit, ritualized trust, and public hypocrisy into a satirical institutional design.
Erewhon functions as a political and social critique of Victorian modernity by refracting British industrial, imperial, religious, and administrative practices into estranged institutions. Its anti-machine laws interrogate technological triumphalism; its inversion of illness and crime denounces moralized governance; its ceremonial banking ridicules the alliance of respectability and power; its discovery narrative questions colonial authority to classify and reform others. By embedding specific mid-nineteenth-century debates—evolution, public health, finance, and church-state legitimacy—within a plausible colonial geography, the book exposes class anxieties, social surveillance, and the capacity of official rationalities to become humane-looking yet punitive systems of control.
—ARIST. Pol.
—Paraphrase.
EREWHON (Dystopian Classic)
Preface to the First Edition
The Author wishes it to be understood that Erewhon is pronounced as a word of three syllables, all short—thus, Ĕ-rĕ-whŏn.
Preface to Second Edition
Having been enabled by the kindness of the public to get through an unusually large edition of “Erewhon” in a very short time, I have taken the opportunity of a second edition to make some necessary corrections, and to add a few passages where it struck me that they would be appropriately introduced; the passages are few, and it is my fixed intention never to touch the work again.
I may perhaps be allowed to say a word or two here in reference to “The Coming Race,” to the success of which book “Erewhon” has been very generally set down as due. This is a mistake, though a perfectly natural one. The fact is that “Erewhon” was finished, with the exception of the last twenty pages and a sentence or two inserted from time to time here and there throughout the book, before the first advertisement of “The Coming Race” appeared. A friend having called my attention to one of the first of these advertisements, and suggesting that it probably referred to a work of similar character to my own, I took “Erewhon” to a well-known firm of publishers on the 1st of May 1871, and left it in their hands for consideration. I then went abroad, and on learning that the publishers alluded to declined the MS., I let it alone for six or seven months, and, being in an out-of-the-way part of Italy, never saw a single review of “The Coming Race,” nor a copy of the work. On my return, I purposely avoided looking into it until I had sent back my last revises to the printer. Then I had much pleasure in reading it, but was indeed surprised at the many little points of similarity between the two books, in spite of their entire independence to one another.
I regret that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat the chapters on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr. Darwin’s theory to an absurdity. Nothing could be further from my intention, and few things would be more distasteful to me than any attempt to laugh at Mr. Darwin; but I must own that I have myself to thank for the misconception, for I felt sure that my intention would be missed, but preferred not to weaken the chapters by explanation, and knew very well that Mr. Darwin’s theory would take no harm. The only question in my mind was how far I could afford to be misrepresented as laughing at that for which I have the most profound admiration. I am surprised, however, that the book at which such an example of the specious misuse of analogy would seem most naturally levelled should have occurred to no reviewer; neither shall I mention the name of the book here, though I should fancy that the hint given will suffice.
I have been held by some whose opinions I respect to have denied men’s responsibility for their actions. He who does this is an enemy who deserves no quarter. I should have imagined that I had been sufficiently explicit, but have made a few additions to the chapter on Malcontents, which will, I think, serve to render further mistake impossible.
An anonymous correspondent (by the hand-writing presumably a clergyman) tells me that in quoting from the Latin grammar I should at any rate have done so correctly, and that I should have written “agricolas” instead of “agricolae”. He added something about any boy in the fourth form, &c., &c., which I shall not quote, but which made me very uncomfortable. It may be said that I must have misquoted from design, from ignorance, or by a slip of the pen; but surely in these days it will be recognised as harsh to assign limits to the all-embracing boundlessness of truth, and it will be more reasonably assumed that each of the three possible causes of misquotation must have had its share in the apparent blunder. The art of writing things that shall sound right and yet be wrong has made so many reputations, and affords comfort to such a large number of readers, that I could not venture to neglect it; the Latin grammar, however, is a subject on which some of the younger members of the community feel strongly, so I have now written “agricolas”. I have also parted with the word “infortuniam” (though not without regret), but have not dared to meddle with other similar inaccuracies.
For the inconsistencies in the book, and I am aware that there are not a few, I must ask the indulgence of the reader. The blame, however, lies chiefly with the Erewhonians themselves, for they were really a very difficult people to understand. The most glaring anomalies seemed to afford them no intellectual inconvenience; neither, provided they did not actually see the money dropping out of their pockets, nor suffer immediate physical pain, would they listen to any arguments as to the waste of money and happiness which their folly caused them. But this had an effect of which I have little reason to complain, for I was allowed almost to call them life-long self-deceivers to their faces, and they said it was quite true, but that it did not matter.
I must not conclude without expressing my most sincere thanks to my critics and to the public for the leniency and consideration with which they have treated my adventures.
June 9, 1872
Preface to the Revised Edition
My publisher wishes me to say a few words about the genesis of the work, a revised and enlarged edition of which he is herewith laying before the public. I therefore place on record as much as I can remember on this head after a lapse of more than thirty years.
The first part of “Erewhon” written was an article headed “Darwin among the Machines[1],” and signed Cellarius. It was written in the Upper Rangitata district of the Canterbury Province (as it then was) of New Zealand, and appeared at Christchurch in the Press Newspaper, June 13, 1863. A copy of this article is indexed under my books in the British Museum catalogue. In passing, I may say that the opening chapters of “Erewhon” were also drawn from the Upper Rangitata district, with such modifications as I found convenient.
A second article on the same subject as the one just referred to appeared in the Press shortly after the first, but I have no copy. It treated Machines from a different point of view, and was the basis of Chapter XXIII of the present edition of “Erewhon.”This view ultimately led me to the theory I put forward in “Life and Habit,” published in November 1877. I have put a bare outline of this theory (which I believe to be quite sound) into the mouth of an Erewhonian philosopher in Chapter XXVII of this book.
In 1865 I rewrote and enlarged “Darwin among the Machines” for the Reasoner, a paper published in London by Mr. G. J. Holyoake. It appeared July 1, 1865, under the heading, “The Mechanical Creation,” and can be seen in the British Museum. I again rewrote and enlarged it, till it assumed the form in which it appeared in the first edition of “Erewhon.”
The next part of “Erewhon” that I wrote was the “World of the Unborn,” a preliminary form of which was sent to Mr. Holyoake’s paper, but as I cannot find it among those copies of the Reasoner that are in the British Museum, I conclude that it was not accepted. I have, however, rather a strong fancy that it appeared in some London paper of the same character as the Reasoner, not very long after July 1, 1865, but I have no copy.
I also wrote about this time the substance of what ultimately became the Musical Banks, and the trial of a man for being in a consumption. These four detached papers were, I believe, all that was written of “Erewhon” before 1870. Between 1865 and 1870 I wrote hardly anything, being hopeful of attaining that success as a painter which it has not been vouchsafed me to attain, but in the autumn of 1870, just as I was beginning to get occasionally hung at Royal Academy exhibitions, my friend, the late Sir F. N. (then Mr.) Broome, suggested to me that I should add somewhat to the articles I had already written, and string them together into a book. I was rather fired by the idea, but as I only worked at the MS. on Sundays it was some months before I had completed it.
I see from my second Preface that I took the book to Messrs. Chapman & Hall May 1, 1871, and on their rejection of it, under the advice of one who has attained the highest rank among living writers, I let it sleep, till I took it to Mr. Trübner early in 1872. As regards its rejection by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, I believe their reader advised them quite wisely. They told me he reported that it was a philosophical work, little likely to be popular with a large circle of readers. I hope that if I had been their reader, and the book had been submitted to myself, I should have advised them to the same effect.
“Erewhon” appeared with the last day or two of March 1872. I attribute its unlooked-for success mainly to two early favourable reviews—the first in the Pall Mall Gazette of April 12, and the second in the Spectator of April 20. There was also another cause. I was complaining once to a friend that though “Erewhon” had met with such a warm reception, my subsequent books had been all of them practically still-born. He said, “You forget one charm that ‘Erewhon’ had, but which none of your other books can have.” I asked what? and was answered, “The sound of a new voice, and of an unknown voice.”
The first edition of “Erewhon” sold in about three weeks; I had not taken moulds, and as the demand was strong, it was set up again immediately. I made a few unimportant alterations and additions, and added a Preface, of which I cannot say that I am particularly proud, but an inexperienced writer with a head somewhat turned by unexpected success is not to be trusted with a preface. I made a few further very trifling alterations before moulds were taken, but since the summer of 1872, as new editions were from time to time wanted, they have been printed from stereos then made.
Having now, I fear, at too great length done what I was asked to do, I should like to add a few words on my own account. I am still fairly well satisfied with those parts of “Erewhon” that were repeatedly rewritten, but from those that had only a single writing I would gladly cut out some forty or fifty pages if I could.
This, however, may not be, for the copyright will probably expire in a little over twelve years. It was necessary, therefore, to revise the book throughout for literary inelegancies—of which I found many more than I had expected—and also to make such substantial additions as should secure a new lease of life—at any rate for the copyright. If, then, instead of cutting out, say fifty pages, I have been compelled to add about sixty invitâ Minervâ—the blame rests neither with my publisher nor with me, but with the copyright laws. Nevertheless I can assure the reader that, though I have found it an irksome task to take up work which I thought I had got rid of thirty years ago, and much of which I am ashamed of, I have done my best to make the new matter savour so much of the better portions of the old, that none but the best critics shall perceive at what places the gaps of between thirty and forty years occur.
Lastly, if my readers note a considerable difference between the literary technique of “Erewhon” and that of “Erewhon Revisited,” I would remind them that, as I have just shown, “Erewhon” look something like ten years in writing, and even so was written with great difficulty, while “Erewhon Revisited” was written easily between November 1900 and the end of April 1901. There is no central idea underlying “Erewhon,” whereas the attempt to realise the effect of a single supposed great miracle dominates the whole of its successor. In “Erewhon” there was hardly any story, and little attempt to give life and individuality to the characters; I hope that in “Erewhon Revisited” both these defects have been in great measure avoided. “Erewhon” was not an organic whole, “Erewhon Revisited” may fairly claim to be one. Nevertheless, though in literary workmanship I do not doubt that this last-named book is an improvement on the first, I shall be agreeably surprised if I am not told that “Erewhon,” with all its faults, is the better reading of the two.
SAMUEL BUTLER.August 7, 1901
Chapter I. Waste Lands
If the reader will excuse me, I will say nothing of my antecedents, nor of the circumstances which led me to leave my native country; the narrative would be tedious to him and painful to myself. Suffice it, that when I left home it was with the intention of going to some new colony, and either finding, or even perhaps purchasing, waste crown land[2] suitable for cattle or sheep farming, by which means I thought that I could better my fortunes more rapidly than in England.
It will be seen that I did not succeed in my design, and that however much I may have met with that was new and strange, I have been unable to reap any pecuniary advantage.
It is true, I imagine myself to have made a discovery which, if I can be the first to profit by it, will bring me a recompense beyond all money computation, and secure me a position such as has not been attained by more than some fifteen or sixteen persons, since the creation of the universe. But to this end I must possess myself of a considerable sum of money: neither do I know how to get it, except by interesting the public in my story, and inducing the charitable to come forward and assist me. With this hope I now publish my adventures; but I do so with great reluctance, for I fear that my story will be doubted unless I tell the whole of it; and yet I dare not do so, lest others with more means than mine should get the start of me. I prefer the risk of being doubted to that of being anticipated, and have therefore concealed my destination on leaving England, as also the point from which I began my more serious and difficult journey.
My chief consolation lies in the fact that truth bears its own impress, and that my story will carry conviction by reason of the internal evidences for its accuracy. No one who is himself honest will doubt my being so.
I reached my destination in one of the last months of 1868, but I dare not mention the season, lest the reader should gather in which hemisphere I was. The colony was one which had not been opened up even to the most adventurous settlers for more than eight or nine years, having been previously uninhabited, save by a few tribes of savages who frequented the seaboard. The part known to Europeans consisted of a coast-line about eight hundred miles in length (affording three or four good harbours), and a tract of country extending inland for a space varying from two to three hundred miles, until it a reached the offshoots of an exceedingly lofty range of mountains, which could be seen from far out upon the plains, and were covered with perpetual snow. The coast was perfectly well known both north and south of the tract to which I have alluded, but in neither direction was there a single harbour for five hundred miles, and the mountains, which descended almost into the sea, were covered with thick timber, so that none would think of settling.
With this bay of land, however, the case was different. The harbours were sufficient; the country was timbered, but not too heavily; it was admirably suited for agriculture; it also contained millions on millions of acres of the most beautifully grassed country in the world, and of the best suited for all manner of sheep and cattle. The climate was temperate, and very healthy; there were no wild animals, nor were the natives dangerous, being few in number and of an intelligent tractable disposition.
It may be readily understood that when once Europeans set foot upon this territory they were not slow to take advantage of its capabilities. Sheep and cattle were introduced, and bred with extreme rapidity; men took up their 50,000 or 100,000 acres of country, going inland one behind the other, till in a few years there was not an acre between the sea and the front ranges which was not taken up, and stations either for sheep or cattle were spotted about at intervals of some twenty or thirty miles over the whole country. The front ranges stopped the tide of squatters for some little time; it was thought that there was too much snow upon them for too many months in the year,—that the sheep would get lost, the ground being too difficult for shepherding,—that the expense of getting wool down to the ship’s side would eat up the farmer’s profits,—and that the grass was too rough and sour for sheep to thrive upon; but one after another determined to try the experiment, and it was wonderful how successfully it turned out. Men pushed farther and farther into the mountains, and found a very considerable tract inside the front range, between it and another which was loftier still, though even this was not the highest, the great snowy one which could be seen from out upon the plains. This second range, however, seemed to mark the extreme limits of pastoral country; and it was here, at a small and newly founded station, that I was received as a cadet, and soon regularly employed. I was then just twenty-two years old.
I was delighted with the country and the manner of life. It was my daily business to go up to the top of a certain high mountain, and down one of its spurs on to the flat, in order to make sure that no sheep had crossed their boundaries. I was to see the sheep, not necessarily close at hand, nor to get them in a single mob, but to see enough of them here and there to feel easy that nothing had gone wrong; this was no difficult matter, for there were not above eight hundred of them; and, being all breeding ewes, they were pretty quiet.
There were a good many sheep which I knew, as two or three black ewes, and a black lamb or two, and several others which had some distinguishing mark whereby I could tell them. I would try and see all these, and if they were all there, and the mob looked large enough, I might rest assured that all was well. It is surprising how soon the eye becomes accustomed to missing twenty sheep out of two or three hundred. I had a telescope and a dog, and would take bread and meat and tobacco with me. Starting with early dawn, it would be night before I could complete my round; for the mountain over which I had to go was very high. In winter it was covered with snow, and the sheep needed no watching from above. If I were to see sheep dung or tracks going down on to the other side of the mountain (where there was a valley with a stream—a mere cul de sac), I was to follow them, and look out for sheep; but I never saw any, the sheep always descending on to their own side, partly from habit, and partly because there was abundance of good sweet feed, which had been burnt in the early spring, just before I came, and was now deliciously green and rich, while that on the other side had never been burnt, and was rank and coarse.
