Erewhon

by Samuel Butler

Genres: Satire; Romance; Paranormal Romance

Synopsis

Not only is 'Erewhon' an adventure story but also Butler's satirical inversion of English customs and philosophy in the 19th century. The explorer Higgs discovers a well organised and civilised country - apparently idyllic. However, the body politic has two ruling obsessions, disease is considered a crime and machinery is seen as a threat to the supremacy of man.In his story Butler identified certain social and industrial conditions which have since become large moral problems. Ever present poverty and encroaching technology ensure that these problems are likely to be with us for a long time. Fantasy 'Erewhon' may be, yet it still has a ring of truth and the power to disturb.

Release date: October 18, 2022

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Having been enabled by the kindness of the public to get through an unusually large edition of Erewhon in a very short time, I have taken the opportunity of a second edition to make some necessary corrections, and to add a few passages where it struck me that they would be appropriately introduced; the passages are few, and it is my fixed intention never to touch the work again.

I may perhaps be allowed to say a word or two here in reference to The Coming Race, to the success of which book Erewhon has been very generally set down as due. This is a mistake, though a perfectly natural one. The fact is that Erewhon was finished, with the exception of the last twenty pages and a sentence or two inserted from time to time here and there throughout the book, before the first advertisement of The Coming Race appeared. A friend having called my attention to one of the first of these advertisements, and suggesting that it probably referred to a work of similar character to my own, I took Erewhon to a well-known firm of publishers on the 1st of May 1871, and left it in their hands for consideration. I then went abroad, and on learning that the publishers alluded to declined the manuscript, I let it alone for six or seven months, and, being in an out-of-the-way part of Italy, never saw a single review of The Coming Race, nor a copy of the work. On my return, I purposely avoided looking into it until I had sent back my last revises to the printer. Then I had much pleasure in reading it, but was indeed surprised at the many little points of similarity between the two books, in spite of their entire independence to one another.

I regret that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat the chapters on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr. Darwin’s theory to an absurdity. Nothing could be further from my intention, and few things would be more distasteful to me than any attempt to laugh at Mr. Darwin; but I must own that I have myself to thank for the misconception, for I felt sure that my intention would be missed, but preferred not to weaken the chapters by explanation, and knew very well that Mr. Darwin’s theory would take no harm. The only question in my mind was how far I could afford to be misrepresented as laughing at that for which I have the most profound admiration. I am surprised, however, that the book at which such an example of the specious misuse of analogy would seem most naturally levelled should have occurred to no reviewer; neither shall I mention the name of the book here, though I should fancy that the hint given will suffice.

I have been held by some whose opinions I respect to have denied men’s responsibility for their actions. He who does this is an enemy who deserves no quarter. I should have imagined that I had been sufficiently explicit, but have made a few additions to the chapter on Malcontents, which will, I think, serve to render further mistake impossible.

An anonymous correspondent (by the hand-writing presumably a clergyman) tells me that in quoting from the Latin grammar I should at any rate have done so correctly, and that I should have written “agricolas” instead of “agricolae.” He added something about any boy in the fourth form, etc., etc., which I shall not quote, but which made me very uncomfortable. It may be said that I must have misquoted from design, from ignorance, or by a slip of the pen; but surely in these days it will be recognized as harsh to assign limits to the all-embracing boundlessness of truth, and it will be more reasonably assumed that each of the three possible causes of misquotation must have had its share in the apparent blunder. The art of writing things that shall sound right and yet be wrong has made so many reputations, and affords comfort to such a large number of readers, that I could not venture to neglect it; the Latin grammar, however, is a subject on which some of the younger members of the community feel strongly, so I have now written “agricolas.” I have also parted with the word “infortuniam” (though not without regret), but have not dared to meddle with other similar inaccuracies.

For the inconsistencies in the book, and I am aware that there are not a few, I must ask the indulgence of the reader. The blame, however, lies chiefly with the Erewhonians themselves, for they were really a very difficult people to understand. The most glaring anomalies seemed to afford them no intellectual inconvenience; neither, provided they did not actually see the money dropping out of their pockets, nor suffer immediate physical pain, would they listen to any arguments as to the waste of money and happiness which their folly caused them. But this had an effect of which I have little reason to complain, for I was allowed almost to call them life-long self-deceivers to their faces, and they said it was quite true, but that it did not matter.

I must not conclude without expressing my most sincere thanks to my critics and to the public for the leniency and consideration with which they have treated my adventures.

June 9, 1872

My publisher wishes me to say a few words about the genesis of the work, a revised and enlarged edition of which he is herewith laying before the public. I therefore place on record as much as I can remember on this head after a lapse of more than thirty years.

The first part of Erewhon written was an article headed “Darwin among the Machines,” and signed Cellarius. It was written in the Upper Rangitata district of the Canterbury Province (as it then was) of New Zealand, and appeared at Christchurch in the Press Newspaper, June 13, 1863. A copy of this article is indexed under my books in the British Museum catalogue. In passing, I may say that the opening chapters of Erewhon were also drawn from the Upper Rangitata district, with such modifications as I found convenient.

A second article on the same subject as the one just referred to appeared in the Press shortly after the first, but I have no copy. It treated Machines from a different point of view, and was the basis of pp. 270-274 of the present edition of Erewhon.1 This view ultimately led me to the theory I put forward in “Life and Habit,” published in November 1877. I have put a bare outline of this theory (which I believe to be quite sound) into the mouth of an Erewhonian philosopher in Chapter XXVII of this book.

In 1865 I rewrote and enlarged “Darwin among the Machines” for the Reasoner, a paper published in London by Mr. G. J. Holyoake. It appeared July 1, 1865, under the heading, “The Mechanical Creation,” and can be seen in the British Museum. I again rewrote and enlarged it, till it assumed the form in which it appeared in the first edition of Erewhon.

The next part of Erewhon that I wrote was the “World of the Unborn,” a preliminary form of which was sent to Mr. Holyoake’s paper, but as I cannot find it among those copies of the Reasoner that are in the British Museum, I conclude that it was not accepted. I have, however, rather a strong fancy that it appeared in some London paper of the same character as the Reasoner, not very long after July 1, 1865, but I have no copy.

I also wrote about this time the substance of what ultimately became the Musical Banks, and the trial of a man for being in a consumption. These four detached papers were, I believe, all that was written of Erewhon before 1870. Between 1865 and 1870 I wrote hardly anything, being hopeful of attaining that success as a painter which it has not been vouchsafed me to attain, but in the autumn of 1870, just as I was beginning to get occasionally hung at Royal Academy exhibitions, my friend, the late Sir F. N. (then Mr.) Broome, suggested to me that I should add somewhat to the articles I had already written, and string them together into a book. I was rather fired by the idea, but as I only worked at the manuscript on Sundays it was some months before I had completed it.

I see from my second Preface that I took the book to Messrs. Chapman & Hall May 1, 1871, and on their rejection of it, under the advice of one who has attained the highest rank among living writers, I let it sleep, till I took it to Mr. Trübner early in 1872. As regards its rejection by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, I believe their reader advised them quite wisely. They told me he reported that it was a philosophical work, little likely to be popular with a large circle of readers. I hope that if I had been their reader, and the book had been submitted to myself, I should have advised them to the same effect.

Erewhon appeared with the last day or two of March 1872. I attribute its unlooked-for success mainly to two early favorable reviews—the first in the Pall Mall Gazette of April 12, and the second in the Spectator of April 20. There was also another cause. I was complaining once to a friend that though Erewhon had met with such a warm reception, my subsequent books had been all of them practically stillborn. He said, “You forget one charm that Erewhon had, but which none of your other books can have.” I asked what? and was answered, “The sound of a new voice, and of an unknown voice.”

The first edition of Erewhon sold in about three weeks; I had not taken molds, and as the demand was strong, it was set up again immediately. I made a few unimportant alterations and additions, and added a Preface, of which I cannot say that I am particularly proud, but an inexperienced writer with a head somewhat turned by unexpected success is not to be trusted with a preface. I made a few further very trifling alterations before molds were taken, but since the summer of 1872, as new editions were from time to time wanted, they have been printed from stereos then made.

Having now, I fear, at too great length done what I was asked to do, I should like to add a few words on my own account. I am still fairly well satisfied with those parts of Erewhon that were repeatedly rewritten, but from those that had only a single writing I would gladly cut out some forty or fifty pages if I could.

This, however, may not be, for the copyright will probably expire in a little over twelve years. It was necessary, therefore, to revise the book throughout for literary inelegancies—of which I found many more than I had expected—and also to make such substantial additions as should secure a new lease of life—at any rate for the copyright. If, then, instead of cutting out, say fifty pages, I have been compelled to add about sixty invitâ Minervâ—the blame rests neither with my publisher nor with me, but with the copyright laws. Nevertheless I can assure the reader that, though I have found it an irksome task to take up work which I thought I had got rid of thirty years ago, and much of which I am ashamed of, I have done my best to make the new matter savor so much of the better portions of the old, that none but the best critics shall perceive at what places the gaps of between thirty and forty years occur.

Lastly, if my readers note a considerable difference between the literary technique of Erewhon and that of Erewhon Revisited, I would remind them that, as I have just shown, Erewhon look something like ten years in writing, and even so was written with great difficulty, while Erewhon Revisited was written easily between November 1900 and the end of April 1901. There is no central idea underlying Erewhon, whereas the attempt to realize the effect of a single supposed great miracle dominates the whole of its successor. In Erewhon there was hardly any story, and little attempt to give life and individuality to the characters; I hope that in Erewhon Revisited both these defects have been in great measure avoided. Erewhon was not an organic whole, Erewhon Revisited may fairly claim to be one. Nevertheless, though in literary workmanship I do not doubt that this last-named book is an improvement on the first, I shall be agreeably surprised if I am not told that Erewhon, with all its faults, is the better reading of the two.

Samuel Butler

August 7, 1901

by Octavia Cade

There’s something particularly strange about living in New Zealand. We’re so far away from everyone else that they see us, often, through a dreamy, idealistic haze. We’re the modern utopia. It’s an attitude that’s been fairly prominent over the course of the ongoing pandemic. There we were, Down Under, a small country coming together to take what we widely saw as strong and sensible measures to combat an unfamiliar disease. Little did we know that common sense would find us so lauded by so many, and I’d have been more flattered if I were certain those who held us up as a pinnacle of competence and community care could at least locate us on a map. This sounds ungrateful, but we’ve got our own problems. Modern-day New Zealand is no utopia. We have, however, been the setting for some.

The most famous was created by Samuel Butler (1835–1902), who emigrated to New Zealand in 1859, mostly to get away from his family.1 There, Butler took up a job farming sheep on Mesopotamia Station in the high country of the South Island.2 He also began to write articles for The Press, a daily newspaper out of Christchurch, which was the closest major settlement to the Station. The first of these articles, a dialogue titled “Darwin on the Origin of Species,” was published in 1862.3 Charles Darwin had only published On the Origin of Species in 1859, so evolution was a hot topic, and one that engaged Butler immensely. Later Press articles included the 1863 publication of “Darwin Among the Machines,”4 which applied the idea of natural selection to technology as well as biology. What would happen to humanity, Butler wondered, if machines became intelligent and started outcompeting us? The outcome, he concluded, would be slavery, and moreover, that slavery was already in progress: “Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.”5 The scientific drive to invent and to perfect those inventions was, Butler argued, probable cause for the rise of “the next successor in the supremacy of the earth,” and over time “we shall find ourselves the inferior race.”6

Today’s science fiction readers may find nothing exceptional in the prospect of conflict between humanity and artificial intelligence, but that familiarity is the product of generations of stories that pit humans against machines. That Butler—a mere four years after On the Origin of Species had firmly established evolution in the imaginations of the general public—applied that theory to the future of machines is extraordinary. The idea that technological development can be viewed through the lens of natural selection is not in itself difficult to grasp, as more-efficient machines render their less-efficient competitors obsolete. Simple observation, too, makes it plain that effective machines can outcompete human labour. Butler was certainly aware of this, given that the Industrial Revolution had comprehensively replaced large numbers of labourers and artisans with machines in many different industries. Furthermore, inventions such as Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, even when not wholly successful, indicated a future where machines could more effectively perform intelligence-based tasks in addition to those involving physical labour. In “Darwin Among the Machines,” Butler combined these three elements and extrapolated them to a future where machines were broadly competitive with, and ultimately superior to, humanity. It was a compelling imaginative feat, and one that stayed with him.

Butler returned to Britain in 1864, the brief years of his Antipodean experiment over and done with. Unsure of what he wanted to do, he writes that “I began tinkering up the old magazine articles I had written in New Zealand, and they strung themselves together into Erewhon.”7 One of those articles was “Darwin Amongst the Machines,” which became the genesis of an Erewhon chapter titled “The Book of the Machines.” The novel was eventually published anonymously in 1872.

A shift in focus from sheep farming to utopian satire is a leap; one from sheep farming to how artificial intelligence may overthrow its human creators is quite another. Looking particularly at the parts of New Zealand ecology that Butler describes, however, the leap from sheep to machines can be traced, primarily through Erewhon’s concern with the applications of Darwinism. Butler’s relationship with Darwinism was a complex one. Joseph Jones, who during his time in New Zealand as a visiting Fulbright lecturer in literature, researched Butler’s time here and its influence on the development of the novel, describes that relationship as occurring in two parts:

first, the New Zealand years and a short period thereafter during which he champions Darwin as a liberator; then, disillusion, reversal of opinion, personal estrangement from Darwin, and finally a thirty years’ war beginning in the later 1870’s [sic] and ending only with death, in 1902.8

While the three-decade “war” that Jones describes occurred after the publication of Erewhon, embedded in Butler’s text is evidence of early anxieties in which effects of natural selection over time and the looming rise of superior machine intelligence are connected.

Before we explore this further, however, it might be useful to briefly place Erewhon in the context of New Zealand utopian thought. The presentation of New Zealand as a utopian destination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was based on a number of factors, including isolation, economic opportunity, and political radicalism. In many ways, this advertised the country as a desirable destination, encouraging migration and settlement.9 It was a way of thought which stuck. The utopian scholar Lyman Tower Sargent considers that “utopianism is central to the creation of New Zealand’s identity as a nation,”10 and this centrality is reflected in the national literature. A broad survey of New Zealand utopian literature is beyond the scope of this introduction, but Erewhon has two close contemporaries and it is interesting to consider the similarities—and the differences—between them. These three utopias were all published within a span of seventeen years. Erewhon was the first, and admittedly it is the stand-out of the three. It follows the story of Higgs, a twenty-two-year-old worker on a South Island sheep station—only a little younger than his author was when he did the same. In Higgs’ explorations, he finds a barely navigable route through the Southern Alps and subsequently discovers the land of Erewhon, a satirical construct in which Butler’s latent anxieties about evolution are extended to often-ludicrous lengths.

Similarly, The Great Romance (1881)11, written by the anonymous author known as “the Inhabitant,” shares Butler’s focus on potential future technologies. The protagonist, the fifty-six-year-old John Hope, wakes from an experimental sleep to a future where telepathy is common and space travel has just begun to transport people, soon to include Hope himself, to Venus. The Great Romance consists of two novellas that were published separately; both volumes survived only as single copies in the Alexander Turnbull and Hocken Libraries.12 The existence of a third potential volume is unproven, although the narrative does appear to want a more substantial conclusion than the second novella currently provides.

Finally, Anno Domini 2000, or Woman’s Destiny (1889)13 by New Zealand premier Sir Julius Vogel (1835–1899, and the man for whom our national science fiction awards are named) is a radical feminist text for its time, albeit one whose prose has been described, with some justification, as “abysmally stilted.”14 Vogel, through the character of twenty-three-year-old Hilda Fitzherbert, expressed his own political goals of women’s education and suffrage. There is no character out of time or place in Anno Domini 2000; any criticism of the utopian society at the centre of the text must therefore come from characters who are deeply familiar with it. Such criticism is not especially forthcoming. Anno Domini 2000 is a utopian romance that is, even more than its predecessors, deeply uncritical about the colonial “empire of United Britain,” which is “the most powerful empire on the globe” with no indication “of any tendency to weakness or decay.”15 Indeed, the praise for that empire, and for its young, handsome Emperor, is positively slavish.

It is difficult to look past the fact that all three authors constructed their utopias through the lens of a colonial mindset. This had inescapable effects on the resulting utopias, focused as they were on the possible futures (or alternate presents, in the case of Butler) that could be achieved by settler societies—particularly white settler societies come out of Europe and onto already-inhabited land. The minimisation of Indigenous peoples in all of these New Zealand utopias is not an accident and will be discussed more fully later.

This specific example of political conservatism is notable, especially considering that the positioning of New Zealand as a utopian setting is of relatively long standing. It is not just the geographical isolation mentioned above that sets people to dreaming. New Zealand has an acknowledged history of political experimentation and radical policy reform: the phrases “state experiments” and “social laboratory” have been commonly used in the political and social history of this country. Arguably, this makes it the perfect place for a utopia . . . although a utopia for whom, and in what capacity?

“And this made me wretched; for I cannot bear having much to do with people who think differently from myself”16

So thinks Higgs in Chapter IX, “To the Metropolis,” as he begins to learn about the unfamiliar customs of the people of Erewhon. In this he is not alone; such a response to an alien way of life is not unusual within science fiction, even if it illustrates an attitude that audiences are not meant to admire. Science fiction is the literary genre that has perhaps the most interest in interrogating conformity—if only because it gives characters something to rebel against and audiences a means of predicting if such rebellion will be necessary. Technological advances are opportunities for social change: consider the development of birth control, genetic engineering, or artificial intelligence, and how each has garnered a multitude of responses, from the most reactionary conservative to the most determined progressive. Change comes with conflict, but utopian expressions of science fiction can tend towards the static. No matter what revolutions are necessary to attain utopia, once arrived it is typically both peaceful and stable. That, perhaps, is the most unrealistic thing about them: for an entire community to share in the same utopian vision requires that all populations within that utopia must be sufficiently satisfied with their positions in that utopia to continue supporting it. On the one hand, the prospect of living in a society that is, for everyone, the ideal is a profoundly optimistic one. On the other, this can be a very sinister form of optimism, and one that is, in practice, all too easy to build upon exclusion.

The implication, certainly within these three New Zealand-based utopias, is that the utopian population is a relatively homogeneous one with strongly shared cultural beliefs. There is little place for the competing individual priorities of pluralism, challenges which many of us face in the world today. I find it quietly amusing that Erewhon begins on a sheep station, given that sheep have the popular reputation of being mindless followers. Compounding my amusement is Butler’s description of a shearing shed, which is “built somewhat on the same plan as a cathedral, with aisles on either side full of pens for the sheep.”17 The sheep in the cathedral, penned into a place of imposed order and orthodoxy. Is this not the perfect, cutting setting for a satirical utopia that wishes to criticise a specific kind of cultural conformity?

That cultural conformity, in Erewhon, is foreshadowed by ecology. Butler’s emigration to New Zealand saw him experience a surreally familiar environment. New Zealand is an isolated island nation that was the last major landmass to be settled by humans. As such, the flora and fauna of the country are distinctive; with the advent of European colonisation, however, and the widespread transformation of the land to make it fit for agriculture, that distinctiveness began to wane. The colonists introduced plants and animals from their homelands, in an attempt to recreate both their culture and landscapes, giving their new settlement a sense of familiarity. It is of particular interest that Christchurch, the major settlement closest to Butler’s own farming adventure, has the common reputation of being “more English than England.” Butler may have travelled thousands of miles from his place of birth, but the country he came to was being deliberately shaped by colonists such as himself to conform to the memories of the home left behind.

In Butler’s time, the transformation was well. . .