Novels Social and Anti-social

Abstract

One of the earliest really disturbing novels was Erewhon, the anagram of ‘nowhere’, published in 1872 and attacking indiscriminately the most prized institutions of England. The author, SAMUEL BUTLER (1835–1902), produced less a novel than a treatise, a first-person fictional narrative with his extreme ideas about the truth of England framed in a satirical account of a newly discovered country. So the peculiarities of Erewhon are in turn stated, examined and coolly criticised, one of the oddest being the local belief that its people were all formerly living unborn, and foolishly contrived and conspired until they managed to get born into this sinful and disappointing world. A pen dipped in oil of vitriol might have seemed the obvious equipment to a coarser mind, but no surface passion or horror shows itself in the style that Butler sustains:

They feel this so strongly that they are resolved to shift the blame on to other shoulders; and have fashioned a long mythology as to the world in which the unborn people live, and what they do, and the arts and machinations to which they have recourse in order to get themselves into our own world. But of this more anon; what I would relate here is their manner of dealing with those who do come.

It is a distinguishing peculiarity of the Erewhonians that when they profess themselves to be quite certain about any matter, and avow it as a base on which they are to build a system of practice, they seldom quite believe in it. If they smell a rat about the precincts of a cherished institution, they will always stop their noses to it if they can.

This is what most of them did in this matter of the unborn, for I cannot (and never could) think that they seriously believed in their mythology concerning pre-existence; they did and they did not; they did not know themselves what they believed; all they did know was that it was a disease not to believe as they did. The only thing of which they were quite sure was that it was the pestering of the unborn [ambiguous: are they pestering or being pestered?] which caused them to be brought into this world, and that they would not have been here if they would have [vulgar for ‘if they had’] only let peaceable people alone.

It would be hard to disprove this position, and they might have a good case if they would only leave it as it stands. But this they will not do; they must have assurance doubly sure; they must have the written word of the child itself as soon as it is born, giving the parents indemnity from all responsibility on the score of its birth, and asserting its own pre-existence.