The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler

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Title: The Way of All Flesh

Author: Samuel Butler

Release Date: April 22, 2005 [eBook #2084]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAY OF ALL FLESH***

Transcribed from the 1912 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

"We know that all things work together for good to them that love
God."--ROM. viii. 28

PREFACE

Samuel Butleter began to write "The Way of All Flesh" about the year
1872, and was engaged upon it intermittently until 1884. It is
therefore, to a great extent, contemporaneous with "Life and Habit," and
may be taken as a practical illustration of the theory of heredity
embodied in that book. He did not work at it after 1884, but for various
reasons he postponed its publication. He was occupied in other ways, and
he professed himself dissatisfied with it as a whole, and always intended
to rewrite or at any rate to revise it. His death in 1902 prevented him
from doing this, and on his death-bed he gave me clearly to understand
that he wished it to be published in its present form. I found that the
MS. of the fourth and fifth chapters had disappeared, but by consulting
and comparing various notes and sketches, which remained among his
papers, I have been able to supply the missing chapters in a form which I
believe does not differ materially from that which he finally adopted.
With regard to the chronology of the events recorded, the reader will do
well to bear in mind that the main body of the novel is supposed to have
been written in the year 1867, and the last chapter added as a postscript
in 1882.

R. A. STREATFEILD.

CHAPTER I

When I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I remember an old
man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings, and who used to hobble
about the street of our village with the help of a stick. He must have
been getting on for eighty in the year 1807, earlier than which date I
suppose I can hardly remember him, for I was born in 1802. A few white
locks hung about