The Cradle of Erewhon (review)

IX. and effect to extremes to claim that an attack on Grahame in the Bank of England by a lunatic named George Robinson provided the material for the scene in which Mr. Toad is nearly shot by a "trigger-happy ferret sentry." Bgt with only one or two such misdirected efforts to trace ultimate sources, Mr. Green's detailed analysis of The Reluctant Dragon" and iHE WIND IN THE WILLOWS is a fascinating piece of research. -- E.S.L. Joseph Jones. THE CRADLE OF EREWHON. Austin: University of Texas P., I960. $4.00. tn The Cradle of Erewhon Professor Jones has collected most of the known facts about the four and a half years Samuel Butler spent in New Zealand; he has effectively examined the articles and letters which Butler wrote for THE PRESS there (and some that he may have written); and he has projected this information against the background of New Zealand at mid-century. Such an enterprize is promising, and anyone interested in Butler's career will be grateful to Professor Jones for undertaking it. Unfortunately the book falls a little short of its high promise. The important point which Professor Jones makes is that New Zealand in the 60's was not, as one is likely to imagine, merely a place of isolation, of "quiet incubation" for Butler, but that it was a varied microcosm of nineteenthcentury England. True, Mesopotamia (his sheep run) was isolated, but from living there, Professor Jones suggests, he derived only one of at least two distinguishable attitudes which he was to use in his later writing. From Mesopotamia and the striking natural scenery surrounding it, he may have developed his clear-sighted observation of nature and his fresh interest in the smallest detail of man's adjustment to his natural surroundings. Thus the imprint of Mesopotamia is on ALPS AND SANCTUARIES and EX VOTO as well as on the long opening sections of EREV/H0N. But in addition to Mesopotamia, Butler also lived in the town of Christchurch—hardly a metropolis, but with enough educated and intelligent people to provide an opportunity for good talk, a town which was also struggling to establish the rudimentary (and thus more clearly apparent) forms of social institutions, the corruptions of which Butler was to satirize. There was the church, the family, the educational system—none fully formed—and over all was the menacing possibility that all institutions might be dominated by the great power of the machine. Clearly, then, EREWHON reflects the influence of both Mesopotamia and Christchurch (though as a matter of fact the two remain unassimilated in the book; the long travelogue-1ike beginning is only superficially relevant to the satirical chapters), and it is useful to have the real-life source of each kind of writing so clearly set forth. F ofessor Jones's research into local conditions in New Zealand is thorough, and he has drawn upon sources of information which are not available here; but it may be that his thoroughness, and his enthusiasm for the country where he spent a year as a Fulbright lecturer, is not an unmixed blessing, for he often falls away from his stated purpose: to examine New Zealand as the cradle of EREWHON. He tends to write instead a series of essays on life in old New Zealand. There is little point, for example, in devoting three pages of a 177page book to document, complete with a contemporary account, the fact that χ. bullocks were, as Butler says they were, recalcitrant and unreliable animals. Nor, though it is true that the building of a railroad in New Zealand may have exemplified the power of the machine, is it helpful to his purpose to give a tedious account of the plans for, the arguments about, and the building of the raiI road. Professor Jones's tendency to make New Zealand and not Butler the focal point of his book is not, however, the book's most serious limitation. One must also beware of his assumptions about the kind of man Butler was before he left England and after he returned. He assumes, for example, that Butler's decision to emigrate came as the climax of...