ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the British museum reading room as a site for Samuel Butler's attempts to understand literary inheritance. It discusses how Butler's ambivalent relationship with the Reading Room plays out in his thoughts about natural history and memory. The two targets of his bricks, literature and science, have fatherhood in common. Samuel Butler confirms the impression that what is initially perceived as charismatic authority may be 'worldly power' in disguise, in the scene from his posthumously published novel that reproduces his 1864 painting. Samuel Butler, however, begins to see fathering and writing as professions with parallel structures, but opposed in that the energy required for one is usurped by the other. Butler's preoccupation within the museum involved sometimes jokingly, sometimes in earnest maintaining the borders between his personal 'record' and that of others. Butler's beliefs transform instinct from a passive physical reflex into an active mental action.
