Samuel Butler: a sketch

Samuel Butler, A Sketch is a short biographical study of the novelist Samuel Butler by Henry Festing Jones, his close friend and authorised biographer. Jones, who lived from 1851 to 1928, was the central figure in establishing Butler’s posthumous reputation and produced several biographical and editorial works in support of that project. This shorter sketch was published before the much longer two volume biography Samuel Butler, A Memoir that appeared in 1919, and it served as a kind of introductory portrait of Butler for readers who wanted a single accessible account of his life and work.

The sketch covers Butler’s life in the standard biographical sequence. There are chapters on his early childhood in the rectory of his father Canon Thomas Butler in Nottinghamshire, on his unhappy time as an undergraduate at Cambridge, on his rebellion against his father’s expectation that he would take orders, on his emigration to New Zealand and his successful years as a sheep farmer there, on his return to England and his long subsequent life as a writer in London, on his various scholarly interests and quarrels including his protracted argument with Charles Darwin about the proper account of evolution, on his slow development of the novel that would become The Way of All Flesh, and on the small group of friends including Jones himself who supported Butler through his largely solitary literary life.

What makes the sketch valuable is Jones’s personal knowledge of Butler across the second half of his life. Jones had been Butler’s closest friend, his regular traveling companion, his collaborator on the music studies that occupied a great deal of Butler’s late years, and the executor of his literary estate. The book is therefore not a piece of distant scholarship but a portrait by someone who had known the subject intimately for decades. Jones writes with affection but also with reasonable critical distance about Butler’s well known difficulties of temperament, his quarrels with friends and family, and the various ways in which his isolation from the mainstream of late Victorian literary life was as much chosen as imposed.

The book is short, perhaps two hundred pages, and is the best brief introduction to Butler available from the people who actually knew him. For readers who have read Butler’s novels and want to know more about the writer, this is the place to start. It pairs naturally with the longer Memoir and with Butler’s own published writings.