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Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902)
Samuel Butler spent only three years in New Zealand as a runholder in the headwaters of the Rangitata before returning to England, but the Canterbury experience gave him a significant base for a literary achievement of great distinction, and a well deserved reputation for irony and controversy. His most famous works, Erewhon, Erewhon Revisited and The Way of All Flesh made him a cult figure in Britain and a leader in the intellectual emancipation from Victorian values.
After his arrival in Lyttelton in 1859, Butler explored the Canterbury high country, found unclaimed sheep country, registered his claim against a rival after a famous race to Christchurch and called his station Mesopotamia ('between two rivers'). Resourceful and energetic, he doubled his capital and freed himself from the dominance of his father and the Anglican church at a time of great intellectual perplexity over the troubling findings of Charles Darwin.
In the early chapters of Erewhon, Butler gave a realistic picture of the Canterbury high country and the land 'over the range', but the focus of the book is on the England he satirised through his description of Erewhonian society.
In his cramped cob hut Butler wrote more 'fugitive' work: long entertaining letters to his family, which his father complied as A First Year in the Canterbury Settlement (1863) and a journal, later edited by P. B. Maling as Samuel Butler at Mesopotamia (1960) each giving vivid and perceptive accounts of the pioneering experience. He also wrote several articles for The Press on such far-ranging topics as 'Darwin Among the Machines', a satire on the adverse effects of technology on our world, to a report on the first Canterbury - England cricket match in comic mock-serious Shakespearean blank verse.
Sources
The Christchurch Writer’s Walkway, E. Beardsley, Canterbury Branch, New Zealand Society of Authors, 1999.
