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LastLecture: Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and the Satirical Revisitations of Victorian Life and Institutions

It is interesting to conclude the overview of metropolitan English civilization in the nineteenth century
with Samuel Butler’s satirical outlook in Erewhon on what used to be called “British life and institutions”
(in the twentieth century study of “Civilization”). Originally published in 1872, the book presents a
perfect but evil whole society set in a remote future time and in an inaccessible part of the world, which
makes the book be a dystopia. Dystopias are the opposite of utopias, though structured exactly like
them. Both utopias and dystopias are a species of literature of ideas (like the essay); they select the
essential characteristics of a given society, transforms them into principles and carries to a hyperbolical
extreme their illustrations in concrete situations, with fictional characters. As inverted utopias, dystopias
represent a species of fantasy which develops only evil forces and allows the world to be entirely
subjugated by evil. The aim of both utopias and dystopias is to examine and criticize a particular society’s
values , practices and institutions.

Samuel Butler’s satire of 1872, Erewhon (an anagram from “nowhere”) criticized in each of its chapters
one of the institutions of modern Victorian society and culture. It starts by transporting its nameless
protagonist “over the range”, to a country of the future where everything is a terrifying exaggeration of
the historical Victorian realities. In this country, which imagines itself to be perfect, all people are
healthy and fit products of the Darwinian theory of evolution. Because Darwin explained that present
natural species are the product of natural selection, which allows only the survival of the fittest, all the
people in Erewhon represent the fittest, perfect human species, being healthy and well formed (men
being brawny, tall and handsome, women beautiful and statuesque); consequently, sickness is punished
at law in Erewhon, crimes are treated as regrettable, shameful diseases. Machines are forbidden in
Erewhon, and the clock carried by the story-protagonist caused him to land in prison first thing after
arriving in the country.1 This is described in a scene of Chapter VII, where he is examined by the first dark
brawny Erewhonians that found him immediately after his arrival:

But by and by they came to my watch, which I had hidden away in the inmost pocket that I had, and had
forgotten when they began their search. They seemed concerned and uneasy as soon as they got hold of
it. They then made me open it and show the works; and when I had done so they gave signs of very rave
displeasure, which disturbed me all the more because I could not conceive wherein it could have
offended them. I soon discovered that I had misinterpreted the expression on the magistrate’s face, and
that it was one not of fear, but hatred. He spoke to me solemnly and sternly for two or three minutes.
Then, reflecting that this was of no use, he caused me to be conducted through several passages into a
large room, which I afterwards found was the museum of the town, and wherein I beheld a sight which

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Students are invited to compare this idea with Carlyle’s dismissal of the modern age as the Age of Machinery in
Thomas Carlyle’s 1829 text, “Signs of the Times”. Carlyle’s examples there configured, however, a species of mild
(urbane, polite, light, amusing) irony, whereas Butler makes machines the “bitter foes” (enemies) of mankind –
because his is savage (dark) satire, destined to shock and trouble. This is in keeping with the two basic species of
satire, practiced in the ancient civilization of Greek and Rome, too, in so far as mild satire is also called Horatian
satire, and savage satire is Juvenal-like satire (according to J.A. Cuddon’s Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and
Literary Theory).
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astonished me more than anything that I had yet seen. It was filled with cases containing all manner of
curiosities—such as skeletons, stuffed birds and animals, carvings in stone (whereof I saw several that
were like those on the saddle, only smaller), but the greater part of the room was occupied by broken
machinery of all descriptions. The larger specimens had a case to themselves, and tickets with writing on
them in a character which I could not understand. There were fragments of steam engines, all broken
and rusted; among them I saw a cylinder and piston, a broken fly-wheel, and part of a crank, which was
laid on the ground by their side. Again, there was a very old carriage whose wheels in spite of rust and
decay, I could see, had been designed originally for iron rails. Indeed, there were fragments of a great
many of our own most advanced inventions; but they seemed all to be several hundred years old, and to
be placed where they were, not for instruction, but curiosity. As I said before, all were marred and
broken.

The explanation of the museum was the fact that four hundred years beforehand the Erewhonians had
decided to dump machinery, which threatened human and natural vitality:

proving that the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct
with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life.

“The Book of the Machines”, described in Chapter XXIII was written to explain their conception :

‘There is no security (…) against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of
machines possessing little consciousness now. the damages brought to human consciousness by the
discarded machines. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some
twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last
twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief
in the bud and to forbid them further progress?

To improve the fate of humanity on earth – by going against the grain of the best Victorian liberal
assumptions, Erewhonians set up Colleges of Unreason and adopted a new religion, Ydgrunism, The
Colleges of Unreason, described in Chapter XXI, resemble the public schools for the British elite, which
occupied the civil service, magistracy and bank positions, just as it did in the Victorian age and it does
today. Unreason is the denial of Victorian materialism as the ultimate development of modern, liberal
reason.

Among those who came to visit me were some who had received a liberal education at the Colleges of
Unreason, and taken the highest degrees in hypothetics, which are their principal study. These
gentlemen had now settled down to various employments in the country, as straighteners, managers and
cashiers of the Musical Banks, priests of religion,

They argue thus—that to teach a boy merely the nature of the things which exist in the world around
him, and about which he will have to be conversant during his whole life, would be giving him but a
narrow and shallow conception of the universe. , which it is urged might contain all manner of things
which are not now to be found therein. To open his eyes to these possibilities, and so to prepare him for
all sorts of emergencies, is the object of this system of hypothetics.
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Apart from the invented word “unreason”, the nihilism and anti-Victorianism of the book is indicated by
the name of the family the protagonist lives with, Robinson, which appears as Nosnibor, and by the
name of their daughter, whom the protagonist fancies, Arowhena; this name uses the Latin alpha
privative (negative prefix a- before the medieval name Rowena). One explicit condemnation of the
Victorian age in Erewhon is to be found in their religion, Ydgrunism, described in Chapter XVII. The
Erewhonian name is an anagram of Mrs Grundy, who stands for an extremely conventional or priggish
person , being a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. Yidgrunism is tantamount to
utilitarianism:

she was a beneficent and useful deity, who did not care how much she was denied so long as she was
obeyed and feared, and who kept hundreds of thousands in those paths which make life tolerably happy.

Erewhonian Musical Banks were a combination of musical and nearly religious gratification connected to
the market and combined Victorian Mammonism and tepid religiousness, two evils already explained by
Carlyle and Newman pass a harsh judgment on Victorian social life and hypocritical institutions.

all mercantile transactions were accompanied with music, so that they were called Musical Banks,
though the music was hideous to a European ear. (…)two distinct currencies, each under the control of its
own banks and mercantile codes. One of these (the one with the Musical Banks) was supposed to be THE
system, and to give out the currency in which all monetary transactions should be carried on; and as far
as I could see, all who wished to be considered respectable, kept a larger or smaller balance at these
banks.(…) I am sure that the managers and cashiers of the Musical Banks were not paid in their own
currency. Mr. Nosnibor used to go to these banks, or rather to the great mother bank of the city,
sometimes but not very often. He was a pillar of one of the other kind of banks, though he appeared to
hold some minor office also in the musical ones. The ladies generally went alone; as indeed was the case
in most families, except on state occasions.

The description of the bank proves that in fact it was a church:

If the outside had been impressive the inside was even more so. It was very lofty and divided into several
parts by walls which rested upon massive pillars; the windows were filled with stained glass descriptive
of the principal commercial incidents of the bank for many ages. In a remote part of the building there
were men and boys singing; this was the only disturbing feature, for as the gamut was still unknown,
there was no music in the country which could be agreeable to a European ear

(…)And yet any one could see that the money given out at these banks was not that with which people
bought their bread, meat, and clothing. It was like it at a first glance, and was stamped with designs that
were often of great beauty; it was not, again, a spurious coinage, made with the intention that it should
be mistaken for the money in actual use; it was more like a toy money, or the counters used for certain
games at cards; for, notwithstanding the beauty of the designs, the material on which they were
stamped was as nearly valueless as possible. Some were covered with tin foil, but the greater part were
frankly of a cheap base metal the exact nature of which I was not able to determine. Indeed they were
made of a great variety of metals, or, perhaps more accurately, alloys, some of which were hard, while
others would bend easily and assume almost any form which their possessor might desire at the
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moment..(…) Of course every one knew that their commercial value was nil, but all those who wished to
be considered respectable thought it incumbent upon them to retain a few coins in their possession, and
to let them be seen from time to time in their hands and purses.