June 18, 1902

Samuel Butler, (December 4, 1835 to June 18, 1902), was the Victorian writer whose book, The Way of All Flesh could only be published posthumously.  The Encyclopedia Britannica situates Butler intellectually in the Darwinian era.

When Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) came into his hands ....it took him by storm; he became “one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers,” and a year or two later he told a friend that he had renounced Christianity altogether. Yet, as it proved, Christianity had by no means finished with him. For the next 25 years it was upon religion and evolution that Butler’s attention was mainly fixed. At first he welcomed Darwinism because it enabled him to do without God.... Later, having found a God ....he rejected Darwinism itself because it left God out.....

[Butler argued, in books like] Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck or Cunning (1887)... Darwin had not really explained evolution at all, .... because he had not accounted for the variations on which natural selection worked....[Butler] conceived creatures as acquiring necessary habits (and organs to perform them) and transmitting these to their offspring as unconscious memories. He thus restored teleology to a world from which purpose had been excluded by Darwin, but instead of attributing the purpose to God he placed it within the creatures themselves as the life force.

Samuel Butler's complicated view of human progress extended to Victorian hobbies like photography. Sontag's On Photography (1977) quotes his view of this enthusiasm:

In end of the century London Samuel Butler complained that "there is a photographer in every bush going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour."

Butler may have been a curmudgeon but he was our kind of cur.