The young man Samuel he attended his grandfather’s school, Shrewsbury, and then went on to the family college, St John’s in Cambridge in 1854. He had shown a great aptitude for painting and planned to become an artist against his father’s wishes.
Butler he went to New Zealand in 1859 in the hope of making his fortune in the colonies. He claimed land he named “Mesopotamia” at the head of the Rangitata River to become a sheep farmer on Canterbury Island, often writing home with descriptions of the various differences in cultures; the letters were later published as A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863). He also published articles and essays in local newspapers. He explored the areas around Canterbury’s four main rivers and is considered by many to be one of New Zealand’s most eminent explorers.
In 1864, Butler he was back in London living on Fleet Street after five successful years in farming, of which his father could be proud. But he had not forgotten his dream of becoming an artist and enrolled in the Heatherley School of Art and then the Royal Academy School, where he exhibited between 1869 and 1876.
Influenced by Italian primitivism, he painted many landscapes, but is best known for his portraits, Family Prayers (1864) one of those remarkable works that he produced during this time, as well as the portrait of one of his instructors, Mr. Heatherley’s Holiday (1873), now in the Tate Gallery, London. Butler She met one of her few friends, Eliza Savage, while they were in school and they corresponded for a time, sharing inventiveness and wit.
‘Erewhon‘is an anagram of’ nowhere ‘, published anonymously in 1870. With sick or sad people sent to jail, robbery rewarded, and machines are not allowed in this fictional and contradictory country, Butler makes unconventional comments about bourgeois society and the institutions of the time. Erewhon Revisited was published in 1901. It examines the implications of Darwinism in Life and Habit (1877). He also ventured into translations and writing of art history and his travel book, Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino was published in 1881. In 1896 he wrote Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler, in admiration and memory of his grandfather. His intellectual departure from the patriarchal pillars of Victorian hypocrisy is satirized in his autobiographical The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously.
Samuel Butler died of consumption in London on June 18, 1902. He is buried in St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, London, England.