'Erewhon; Or, Over the Range' by Samuel Butler: A Scholarly Edition

Abstract

This thesis comprises a scholarly edition of Samuel Butler’s satirical novel 'Erewhon; or, Over the Range' (1872). All prior editions and reprints of 'Erewhon' have positioned it squarely within the traditions of Menippean satire and British intellectual culture; this edition situates 'Erewhon' in its colonial context for the first time, stressing its debt to Butler’s movement between the centre and margin of Britain’s expanding empire. The General Introduction argues that Erewhon is a product of two experiences of Butler’s early life: his education at Cambridge University from 1854–1858 and his sojourn in the Canterbury colony in New Zealand, as a pastoralist, from 1859–1864. Taking Butler’s mistrust of logical reasoning as the central example, I examine how the conditions of colonial life provided a dynamic challenge to the intellectual framework of Butler’s elite, localised liberal education. The Editorial Introduction carries an ancillary argument in favour of the first edition as copy-text. No previous edition of Erewhon has reproduced this text. Tracing the novel’s complex compositional and publication history in relation to D. F. McKenzie’s sociology of texts, I argue that the first edition is moulded by Butler’s experiences at the imperial centre and periphery of empire, while subsequent editions are shaped by his later theories of art and evolution forged in England and Italy. My privileging of the first edition, and the manuscript from which it was forged, is reflected in the content and organisation of the scholarly apparatus, as explained in the Editorial Methods section. The apparatus includes a collation of variants between Butler’s manuscript and the first edition; notes about the manuscript; collated variants from all print editions; and a comprehensive critical commentary designed to support a variety of scholarly interests, but also grounding the novel in the reciprocal flow of ideas between Cambridge and Canterbury in the mid-nineteenth century.