Novel: Erewhon

Overview
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) is a satirical travel narrative that masquerades as a utopian discovery while exposing the follies of Victorian England. Its title is “Nowhere” with letters transposed, signaling a topsy-turvy mirror. Written after Butler’s years as a sheep farmer in New Zealand, the book blends adventure with essayistic interludes to critique religion, morality, punishment, education, finance, and the cult of progress. It is both a parody of utopian literature and an early landmark of speculative fiction, particularly notable for its anxiety about machines.

Plot
A young English settler in a southern colony, guided at first by a reluctant native named Chowbok, ventures over a forbidding mountain range and stumbles upon a hidden country. Captured and then cautiously welcomed, he learns the language and customs and is lodged with the wealthy Nosnibor family. He falls in love with their daughter Arowhena, even as he navigates the country’s baffling inversions of common sense.

Erewhonian law punishes illness as a crime and treats crime as a disease, so a man with a cold is arrested while a swindler enters a “hospital.” Public religious life centers on the Musical Banks, where people perform empty rites while conducting serious financial business elsewhere. Social conduct is governed by a goddess called Ydgrun, really Mrs Grundy, the spirit of conventional respectability, and the people openly profess her worship as a practical necessity.

The traveler runs afoul of another pillar of Erewhonian society: the machine laws. Centuries earlier the Erewhonians enacted sweeping prohibitions after arguing that machines might evolve and supplant humanity. When authorities discover his pocket-watch, he is imprisoned for possessing a proscribed device. Released but marked as suspect, he realizes he must flee. With Arowhena’s help he constructs a balloon, ascends over the mountains, drifts out to sea, and is rescued by a passing ship. Back in the outside world, he marries Arowhena and begins to plan a return, entertaining schemes to “civilize” Erewhon with trade and missionary zeal, an irony that underscores the colonial impulse the narrative has been quietly sending up all along.

Society and Satire
Erewhon is a gallery of satiric reversals. At the Colleges of Unreason, the highest prestige goes to the study of Hypothetics, and “straighteners” serve as moral physicians who cure deviance. Birth and marriage are heavily regulated in the name of improving the stock, a coolly rational eugenics that exposes the era’s fascination with heredity. The Musical Banks divide symbolic virtue from real power: everyone pays lip service to ritual currency while relying on secular institutions for actual security. The Nosnibors’ financial disgrace and rehabilitation lampoon the elastic morality of markets.

“The Book of the Machines”
Three famous chapters argue, with poker-faced logic, that machines already form a kind of species and, under evolutionary pressures, could outpace humanity. Butler extends Darwinian reasoning to technology, only to highlight how easily the rhetoric of progress can become self-canceling. The Erewhonians’ precautionary smashings are extreme, yet their fears are unnervingly modern; the sections have been read as prophetic meditations on automation and artificial intelligence.

Form, Tone, and Legacy
Butler’s narrator adopts the candid tone of a travel memoirist, but the journey continually yields to reflective set pieces that read like essays. The blend is purposeful: the episodic plot lets Butler stage thought experiments rather than resolve conflicts. Erewhon helped seed the dystopian tradition by showing how an apparent utopia can be built on coherent absurdities. Its cool inversions, crime as disease, faith as ceremony, progress as peril, still frame arguments about penal reform, public health, institutional hypocrisy, and the governance of technology. Butler later revisited the country in Erewhon Revisited (1901), naming the narrator Higgs and further sharpening the critique of missionary certainty.