The Samuel Butler Collection

The Samuel Butler Collection is a gathered edition of materials by and about the novelist Samuel Butler, presented in collected form by Henry Festing Jones, Butler’s close friend and authorised biographer. Jones, who lived from 1851 to 1928, devoted the years after Butler’s death in 1902 to organizing and publishing the substantial body of unpublished material that Butler had left behind, including his notebooks, his correspondence, and the various unfinished manuscripts that occupied him at the time of his death.

Butler was an unusual literary figure who produced relatively little during his lifetime but who left an enormous archive of notebooks, drafts, and correspondence that documented his many interests and his long argument with most of the major intellectual orthodoxies of his time. The novel The Way of All Flesh, written across many years and published only after Butler’s death, has been generally considered his masterpiece and one of the most important English novels of the late nineteenth century. His writings on evolution, on the homer question, on the English education system, and on many other subjects ran across magazines and small private printings during his lifetime and were gathered together only in the years after his death by Jones and other devoted friends.

The collection that Jones assembled brings together a selection of materials that Jones believed would best represent Butler’s range and his particular qualities of mind. It typically includes essays from various periods of Butler’s career, selections from the notebooks where he recorded his observations and arguments over many decades, biographical material that Jones drew from his personal knowledge of Butler, and selections from the correspondence that Butler had maintained with his friends and family during his lifetime. The arrangement gives a clearer picture of Butler as a thinker and a personality than any single one of his books could provide on its own.

The collection runs to several hundred pages and is best read by selection rather than straight through. For readers interested in Samuel Butler, this is essential supplementary material to the better known novels and to Butler’s own substantial published writings. It pairs naturally with The Way of All Flesh, with Erewhon, and with Jones’s own monumental biography Samuel Butler, A Memoir, which appeared in 1919.