Erewhon Revisited - Twenty Years Later Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His Son
First edition, 1901
Erewhon Revisited: Twenty Years Later (1901) is Samuel Butler's return to Erewhon, written nearly three decades after the original and notably more focused in its satirical aim. Where Erewhon (1872) proceeds as a loosely structured sequence of philosophical inversions, the sequel is built around a single sustained argument about the mechanics of religious myth-making.
The narrator of the original novel, now identified as Higgs, returns to Erewhon to find that his departure by balloon with Arowhena has been transformed into a founding miracle. A new religion has grown up around the event, its central figure the "Sunchild," and its priesthood represented by two worldly and self-serving professors, Hanky and Panky, who have very little interest in what Higgs actually said or did. Sunchildston, formerly Coldharbour, is now a religious center, complete with temples, rites, and a body of doctrine bearing only a distant relation to anything Higgs intended.
Butler's target is not Christianity specifically but the universal mechanism by which a personality, attached to an apparently miraculous event, generates institutions that then acquire a life entirely independent of their origin. The novel traces this process with dry precision, following Higgs as he navigates a world that has made a god of him and would find his continued existence deeply inconvenient. His son George, who narrates portions of the book, adds a second perspective on what has been lost in translation between experience and doctrine.
Erewhon Revisited is the more tightly constructed of the two books, and in some ways the more pointed one, though it lacks the sprawling inventiveness of the original.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, original maroon cloth, stamped in gold, top edges gilt. Includes errata slip tipped-in just before the preface. . London: Grant Richards, 1901. #10718.
Bookplate of Sir William Beale affixed to front paste-down. Spine lightly sunned and some minor bumps, but otherwise a bright, very good or better copy.
The narrator of the original novel, now identified as Higgs, returns to Erewhon to find that his departure by balloon with Arowhena has been transformed into a founding miracle. A new religion has grown up around the event, its central figure the "Sunchild," and its priesthood represented by two worldly and self-serving professors, Hanky and Panky, who have very little interest in what Higgs actually said or did. Sunchildston, formerly Coldharbour, is now a religious center, complete with temples, rites, and a body of doctrine bearing only a distant relation to anything Higgs intended.
Butler's target is not Christianity specifically but the universal mechanism by which a personality, attached to an apparently miraculous event, generates institutions that then acquire a life entirely independent of their origin. The novel traces this process with dry precision, following Higgs as he navigates a world that has made a god of him and would find his continued existence deeply inconvenient. His son George, who narrates portions of the book, adds a second perspective on what has been lost in translation between experience and doctrine.
Erewhon Revisited is the more tightly constructed of the two books, and in some ways the more pointed one, though it lacks the sprawling inventiveness of the original.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, original maroon cloth, stamped in gold, top edges gilt. Includes errata slip tipped-in just before the preface. . London: Grant Richards, 1901. #10718.
Bookplate of Sir William Beale affixed to front paste-down. Spine lightly sunned and some minor bumps, but otherwise a bright, very good or better copy.
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