ABSTRACT
Habitus Examples from the end of the era In Samuel Butler’s aforementioned largely autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh1 (first published in 1903, but in fact written in the 1870s), the hero Ernest Pontifex suffers the bitter fate of being robbed of his entire fortune by a faithless friend and, as a result, even being sent to prison. Butler reflects on the importance of such economic disasters, comparing them with other types of woe:
These sentences express perfectly the perception of social classes whose position primarily depends rather on private property and the market than on reputation. In contrast, to members of the old warrior caste, nothing seemed more important than honour. Butler explicitly places reputation third; for him (and the large number of others in Victorian England whose opinion he represents), loss of money hits people significantly harder than serious surgery, incurable illness or being hanged – even this fate was dealt with coolly and calmly by many. Suicide, meanwhile, was a common consequence of loss of money: this was not only in itself the most painful affliction, but also the cause of all the others.
