Way of All Flesh

"If the house caught on fire, the Victorian novel I would rescue from the flames would be not 'Vanity Fair' or 'Bleak House' but Samuel Butler's 'The Way of All Flesh'. It is read, I believe, mostly by the young, bent on making out a case against their elders, but Butler was fifty when he stopped working on it, and no reader much under that age is likely to appreciate the full beauty of its horrors, which are not the horrors of the Gothic novel but of family life.Way of All Flesh, with ISBN 9781404338821 and ISBN 1404338829.