After a grand tour with his parents at a time when European railways were in their infancy (1843), an expedition which impressed Butler profoundly, he in 1848 was placed under Benjamin Hall Kennedy, his grandfather's successor at Shrewsbury. In October 1854 'Sam' went up to Cambridge and graduated from the family college (St. John's), as twelfth in the classical tripos in 1858. He was grounded in Homer and Thucydides by Shilleto, and while still an undergraduate wrote among other trifles 'The Shield of Achilles, an Homeric Picture of Cambridge Life,' which skilfully burlesques a typical Homer 'crib' of the period (reprinted in The Eagle, December 1902). Paternal influence exercised with unsparing hand constrained Butler into the priestly path, which he traversed far enough to become a lay reader to the curate of St. James's, Piccadilly, (Sir) Philip Perrin. At Cambridge he had come under Simeon's influence. But doubt first assailed him in connection with the question of the efficacy of infant baptism. An angry correspondence ensued with his father (upon whom he was pecuniarily dependent), and Samuel remained unconvinced.
Early attempts at becoming a painter were sternly deprecated by the family, and Butler resolved to emigrate to New Zealand. Taking passage in the ill-fated Burmah, he changed his berth at the last moment to the Roman Emperor, and sailed from Gravesend on 30 Sept. 1859. His success in the colony, mainly as a sheep-breeder in the Rangitata district of the middle (Canterbury) Island, is detailed in long letters home, which—supplemented by two chapters contributed to the St. John's College 'Eagle'—formed the basis of his first book 'A First Year in Canterbury Settlement,' published by Longmans, and edited by his father, with a preface dated 'Langar Rectory, 29 June 1863.' The work is is full of Butler's quasi-humorous detail, sub-acid in flavour, and plain almost to aridity in point of style. In the same vein are the contributions which Butler made to the 'Christchurch Press,' among them the witty speculation entitled 'Darwin among the Machines,' which formed the nucleus of 'Erewhon,' the book which first brought him recognition. His sheep run was successful, and selling out at a fortunate moment he practically doubled what money his father had given him (approximately four thousand pounds).
In 1864-5 Butler returned to England, and established himself in chambers, consisting of three rooms and a pantry, on the second floor at 15 Clifford's Inn. After a brief course at South Kensington he studied painting at F. S. Gary's (the son of Lamb's friend), and then at Heatherley's school in Newman Street. In the course of the next few years he exhibited as many as eleven pictures in the Royal Academy. In 1865 he printed the anonymous pamphlet (drafted in New Zealand) 'The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists critically examined,' the product of the doubts which had assailed him since 1859, and which he subsequently incorporated in 'The Fair Haven.' In 1872 he produced the brilliant, if somewhat fragmentary, 'Erewhon,' a jeu d'esprit which recalled the vein of Swift. The trial of a man for the offence of suffering from consumption (as an illustration of the analogy of crime and disease), and the view of machines—as representing and eventually dominating the functions of man—are strongly suggestive of a new Gulliver, but the book also contains the most original of Butler's conceptions his preference for physical over moral health, his derision of earnestness and of the solemn pretences of parenthood, his conviction of the unconscious transmission of habit and memory from one generation to another, the superior importance of manners to beliefs, the antennae of art to the sledge-hammers of science. All the more from the fact that they were quite unfathomable by his own age, Butler clung to his ideas with grim and humorous tenacity. 'Erewhon' was published anonymously, like its successor—a far more elaborate exercise in irony—'The Fair Haven' (1873). This volume pretended to be a defence of the miraculous element in our Lord's ministry upon earth, both as against rationalist impugners and certain orthodox defenders, and was put forth as by the late John Pickard Owen and as edited by William Bickersteth Owen, with a memoir of the author (published by Trübner, with preface dated 'Brighton, 10 March 1873'). Incredible as it seems, in view of the ubiquitous mockery and fictitious titles, 'The Fair Haven' was accepted as seriously as Defoe's 'Shortest Way with the Dissenters' by the ultra-Protestant press. Butler's anonymity was due in part to Swift's Bickerstaff tradition of mystification, and partly to his unwillingness to provoke further controversy with his father, but he affixed his name to subsequent editions both of this book and of 'Erewhon.' The profits which he had made in New Zealand
