Erewhon (Revised)

In this privately published work (1872), written in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, English novelist, essayist, and iconoclast Samuel Butler (1835-1902) describes an imaginary visit to a topsy-turvy country called Erewhon (an anagram of “nowhere”), where it is a punishable offense to be physically ill, but where criminality and immorality are looked kindly upon as treatable diseases. The English church is pilloried in the system of “Musical Banks, ” whose currency nobody believes in but which everyone pretends to value. Universities teach courses on how to say nothing at great length, and all machines have been banned for fear that they will develop through evolution and enslave the citizens. In this and other classic works, including The Way of All Flesh, Butler delighted in attacking the complacency and hypocrisy of Victorian manners and religion.