Erewhon

Erewhon is a novel by Samuel Butler published in 1872. The title is also the name of a country, supposedly discovered by the protagonist. In the novel it is not revealed in which part of the world Erewhon is, but it is clear that it is a fictional country. Butler obviously meant the title to be a clear anagram of Nowhere, it is likely that he did this to protect himself from accusations of being antipatriotic, although Erewhon is clearly a satire of Victorian society.

The first few chapters of the novel, dealing with the discovery of Erewhon, are in fact based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand, where as a young man he was a sheep farmer for about four years (1860-1864) and where he explored parts of the interior of the South Island. (One of the country's largest sheep farms, located in this region, is named Erewhon in his honour)

The greater part of the book consists of a description of Erewhon. The nature of this nation is clearly intended to be ambiguous. At first glance Erewhon appears to be a utopia, yet it soon becomes clear that this is far from the case. Yet for all the failings of Erewhon it is also clearly not a dystopia (or anti-utopia), an undesirable society such as that depicted by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. As a satirical utopia Erewhon has sometimes been compared to Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the image of Utopia in this case also bearing strong parallels with the self-view of the British Empire at the time.

Erewhon satirizes various aspects of Victorian society, including criminal punishment, religion and anthropocentrism. In Erewhon law-offenders are treated as if they were ill, whilst ill people are looked upon as criminals, for example. Another feature of Erewhon is that there are no machines, because they are considered to be dangerous: they might develop consciousness and supersede humankind. This last aspect of Erewhon reveals the influence of Charles Darwin's evolution theory; Butler had read The Origin of Species soon after it was published in 1859.

The three chapters of Erewhon that make up "The Book of the Machines" were developed from a number of articles that Butler had contributed to a local periodical while in New Zealand. Butler was the first to write about the possibility that machines develop consciousness. To him it was a joke, but today scientists and philosophers are seriously debating whether computers and robots could develop the same kind of intelligence and consciousness as human beings. This is known as artificial intelligence and artificial life. It is also a popular theme in science-fiction novels and movies, but rather than wondering whether artificial intelligence (or AI) and artificial life are possible, they raise the question what the relationship between human beings and machines with artificial intelligence would be (and whether the development of artificial intelligence is desirable at all).

Erewhon has many more curious aspects, such as the notion that children choose their parents. His "Musical Banks" chapter is an attack on religious hypocrisy. Banks of that era were few and quite magnificent, but the satire does not end with their comparison to cathedrals in these characteristics.

In that chapter, he mentions that these banks have their own currency, which is not honored by the other banks. This refers to a forgotten practice. During the age when the whole point of money was that it was made of precious metal, there was a lot of trimming or shaving of coins once they were released to the public, even though people were expected to accept the diminished coins at their face value. These bits were sold under the counter to an assayer. There was also a lot of counterfeiting. It would not due for churches to be implicated in these activities. Thus, churches actually had money-changing tables at which each coin would be examined separately and a token of actual worth given to the layperson so that he or she could be seen by the other parishoners as putting money in the basket during that part of the service. These tokens had religious images upon them; this also prevented pilferage. The money-changing was done at some other time from the service itself. (Some distinguished Protestant churches in the US had this practice in the 19th century, besides the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.) The practice goes back to the days of temple of Jerusalem, but then it was done for the different reason that money offered to the temple did not have the images of pagan gods on it.

At its first release, this book sold far better than any of Butler's other works -- perhaps because the British public assumed that the pseudonym alluded to someone far more socially important. In 1901 a revised and expanded edition of Erewhon was issued with some new chapters covering vegetarianism and other practices.

External links

• Template:Gutenberg - Revised 1901 edition of "Erewhon" at Project Gutenberg