The Way of All Flesh (1903) "exploded like a bomb" in Edwardian drawing rooms. Based on Samuel Butler's own life and published posthumously, it offers a scathing indictment of Victorian bourgeois values as personified in five generations of the Pontifex family. Butler's satire centers on Ernest Pontifex, an orthodox young man who suddenly sees the falseness of the rules and expectations forced on him by parents and teachers, an epiphany which leads him to renounce the moral, religious, and social values he once held.
