- cock's had ended,[1] extended through the next half century,
The Way of All Flesh and Notebooks being posthumous. But the three decades bracketed by the two Erewhons were the fertile ones. Through them flowed steadily a stream of many currents; satiric, scientific (mainly controversial), classic, critical, descriptive, expository, musical, and artistic. Of all these volumes only three can be classed as fiction, and one of those falls in the other group. Our present interest centers upon Erewhon and its sequel.
There is no more effective satiric machinery than that of the Foreign State, or Adventures among Strange People. It may take the form of a serious though perhaps fantastic conception with incidental satire, as in Utopia, New Atlantis, The Coming Race, Modern Utopia; or a travesty of these, an inverted pyramid, made grotesque by the dominating satire, though none the less freighted with serious intent, as Gulliver, Journey from This World to the Next, Erewhon.
From the fact that The Coming Race and Erewhon may be cited as examples of the same literary genus, though of different species, comes the suggestion that the real complement of Butler is Lytton. It does happen that they furnish the only two instances on our list of the exercise of this particular kind of creative fancy.[2] Lytton's tale pictures a positive ideal, which satirizes our inadequate reality by acting as a foil to it. Butler's narrative portrays a supposed reality, of which the visitor does not approve; and his comments satirize our accepted reality
- ↑ With The First Canterbury Settlement, in 1863.
- ↑ The coincidence that gave the public The Coming Race in 1871, and Erewhon in 1872 brought the charge of a possible plagiarism in the latter. If the absurd notion that Butler needed any light borrowed from Lytton, is worth expelling, Butler's own candid statement about it should be sufficient for the purpose.
