Samuel Butler (novelist) - Early Life

Early Life

Butler was born either on 4 or 5 December 1835 at the rectory in the village of Langar, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, England, to the Rev. Thomas Butler, son of Dr. Samuel Butler, headmaster of Shrewsbury School and eventual Bishop of Lichfield. Dr. Butler was the son of a tradesman and descended from a line of yeomen, but, his scholarly aptitude being recognized at young age, was sent to Rugby and Cambridge, where he distinguished himself and launched his successful career. His only son Thomas wished to go into the Navy, but succumbed to paternal pressure and entered the Church, in which he led a wholly undistinguished career, all the more so in contrast with his father's. It has been suggested that this family dynamic had some impact on Samuel, insofar as it created the oppressive home environment (chronicled in The Way of All Flesh) which deeply formed his approach to the world. Thomas Butler, states one critic, "to make up for having been a servile son, became a bullying father."

In any event, Samuel Butler's relationship with his parents, and especially with his father, was largely antagonistic. His education began at home, and it included frequent beatings, as was not uncommon at the time. Samuel, however, found his parents particularly "brutal and stupid by nature," and their relationship to him never progressed beyond the adversarial. He later recorded of his father that, "He never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollections I can call to mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him…. I have never passed a day without thinking of him many times over as the man who was sure to be against me." Under his parents' influence, he was set on course to follow his father into the priesthood. He was sent to Shrewsbury and then in 1854 went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a First in Classics in 1858 (the graduate society of St John's is named the Samuel Butler Room (SBR) in his honour).