Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872)
Erewhon is Samuel Butler’s best-known work. It is often likened to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, offering an amusing but incisive satire of the author’s own society. The novel charts the narrator’s passage ‘over the range’, from a mountainous landscape based on the New Zealand territories Butler had explored, into an imaginary country representative of ‘nowhere’. Religious, legal, financial and social customs in Erewhon provide a strange contrast to the narrator’s native England, prompting his musings on the philosophical foundations of Victorian values. Originally published anonymously, Erewhon proved an immediate success and Butler’s name appeared on all subsequent editions.
This volume (above) belonged to Butler’s friend Henry Festing Jones and contains two pages of manuscript additions, pasted in by Butler, which were later incorporated into the text.
The volumes below show the covers of later editions of Erewhon.
BII ERE 1935.2 and BII ERE 1970.1