It's the birthday of British writer Samuel Butler, born in Nottinghamshire, England (1835). He came from a family of clerics, and his father assumed Samuel would also become a priest. He went to a parish in London, and it was there that he realized that people who had been baptized were not necessarily morally superior to people who hadn't been baptized. He started questioning Christianity in letters to his father, and eventually lost all faith in religion. He left the parish and sailed off to New Zealand to become a sheep farmer. He made a decent living, and began to read widely. He was fascinated by Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), which had recently been published, and he struck up a correspondence with Darwin. In 1872, he published a satire called Erewhon, which both supported and challenged Darwin's ideas about evolution. Readers loved it, but it was the only book Butler wrote that had any success until his death in 1902.

After he died, an incomplete novel that Butler had begun 30 years earlier, The Way of All Flesh, was found in his desk drawer. When it was published in 1903, it sold more copies than any of his works did when he was alive. It's the story of Ernest Pontifex, who grows up the son of a cruel clergyman, enters the priesthood himself, and then falls into a series of scandals when he gives his money to a pregnant maid and then mistakes a respectable lady for a prostitute. Critics called it a masterpiece of satire. After its publication, all Butler's notebooks and memoirs were published, and he suddenly became known as a great Victorian writer.

The writer V.S. Pritchett said, "The Way of All Flesh is one of the time-bombs of literature. One thinks of it lying in Samuel Butler's desk for 30 years, waiting to blow up the Victorian family and with it the whole great pillared and balustraded edifice of the Victorian novel."