ABSTRACT
Meanwhile Butler had published Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872), his only book to win fame among his contemporaries. Mr. Higgs, the hero (if he may be so called), traverses the mountains of New Zealand and finds himself in a hitherto undiscovered country among strange people. Butler's imaginary commonwealth is not an ideal state, though some of its characteristics-gracious living, prosperity, physical health-reflect Butler's ideal. But in other respects-the worship of the goddess Y dgrun ("Mrs. Grundy," i.e., respectability) and the institution of the Musical Banks (conventional religion based upon pharisaic smugness)-the story is a satiric and ironic mirror of English society, resembling parts of Gulliver's Travels but described with a cool amusement in which there is nothing of Swift's saeva indignatio. Fallacies art. exposed by means of ingenious paradox, and with infinite cleverness cogent reasoning is conducted from designedly unsound premises. The theory that machines are extensions of human organs is a parody of popular Darwinism but not without tragic implications for the future of mankind. Butler's modernity is also evinced in his doctrines of the rectifiability of moral error and the criminality of disease as an offense against the race.
