Erewhon

Erewhon is a satirical novel, meaning that it uses humor and irony to highlight and criticize the issues, mistakes, and foolish aspects that the author, Samuel Butler, observes in his own world. In this case, Butler is satirizing Victorian England, and much of the content of Erewhon reflects Butler’s thoughts and opinions on the state on England in the late 19th century, during and following the Industrial Revolution. Satire itself is a genre that is used frequently in English literature as a means of humorously yet incisively criticizing society’s many flaws and foibles. Such precursors of Erewhon in this genre are early 18th-century works such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad. Although influenced by both of these titles, Erewhon is most closely tied to Gulliver’s Travels, as both Butler’s work and Swift’s use the setting of a fictional country and population to mock and mimic the trends and thoughts that were common in England during the authors’ respective time frames.

Generally speaking, satirical works often use cues such as hyperbole, parody, or sarcasm to indicate to the reader that a real issue is being mocked underneath the quasi-fantastical trappings of the story itself. For example, in Erewhon, Butler uses hyperbole when the narrator describes the judgment passed in court against a man with tuberculosis, in which the judge laments that he cannot give the man the death penalty for the offense of having this illness. This proclamation is meant to strike the reader as darkly humorous, for tuberculosis in the 19th century was quite often a death sentence anyway. Given this grim reality, Butler intends for the reader to note the ridiculousness of the judge’s comments and to examine the real world for examples that might parallel such absurdity. In this case, the real-life example would be the English justice system, which often sentences people to death for crimes that are beyond their control or those that develop due to the circumstances of the perpetrator’s life. Thus, Butler uses humorous satire to draw attention to more serious issues and trends in society’s collective consciousness, pointing to lines of thought and beliefs that are likely to be held by most readers, then encouraging reflection through laughter. Though Erewhon contains many elements that are unique to Victorian England, many of its incisive observations can be validly applied to a wide range of historical time frames and settings in human history, and still hold significant weight today.