In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted.

[4] Dr. Butler was the son of a tradesman and descended from a line of yeomen, but his scholarly aptitude being recognised at a young age, he had been sent to Rugby and Cambridge, where he distinguished himself.

His only son, Thomas, wished to go into the Navy but succumbed to paternal pressure and entered the Anglican clergy, in which he led an undistinguished career, in contrast to his father's.

He was sent to Shrewsbury at age twelve, where he did not enjoy the hard life under its headmaster Benjamin Hall Kennedy, whom he later drew as "Dr. Skinner" in The Way of All Flesh.

After Cambridge, he went to live in a low-income parish in London 1858–1859 as preparation for his ordination into the Anglican clergy; there he discovered that infant baptism made no apparent difference to the morals and behaviour of his peers and began questioning his faith.

He wrote of his arrival and life as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), and he made a handsome profit when he sold his farm, but his chief achievement during his time there consisted of drafts and source material for much of his masterpiece Erewhon.

[10] Butler returned to England in 1864, settling in rooms in Clifford's Inn (near Fleet Street), where he lived for the rest of his life.

His close interest in the art of the Sacri Monti is reflected in Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881) and Ex Voto (1888).

His semi-autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh, did not appear in print until after his death, as he considered its tone of satirical attack on Victorian morality too contentious at the time.

The manuscript was edited by Daniel F. Howard as Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh (Butler's original title) and published for the first time in 1964.

"[16] His first significant male friendship was with the young Charles Pauli, son of a German businessman in London, whom Butler met in New Zealand.

[17][18] After 1878, Butler became close friends with Henry Festing Jones, whom he persuaded to give up his job as a solicitor to be his personal literary assistant and travelling companion, at a salary of £200 a year.

Although Jones kept his own lodgings at Barnard's Inn, the two men saw each other daily until Butler's death in 1902, collaborating on music and writing projects in the daytime, and attending concerts and theatres in the evenings; they also frequently toured Italy and other favorite parts of Europe together.

[17] Another friendship was with Hans Rudolf Faesch, a Swiss student who stayed with Butler and Jones in London for two years, improving his English, before departing for Singapore.

However, once the Oscar Wilde trial began in the spring of that year, with revelations of homosexual behaviour among the literati, Butler feared being associated with the widely reported scandal and in a panic wrote to all the magazines, withdrawing his poem.

[17] Some critics, beginning with Malcolm Muggeridge in The Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler (1936), concluded that Butler was a sublimated or repressed homosexual and that his lifelong status as an "incarnate bachelor" was comparable to that of his writer contemporaries Walter Pater, Henry James, and E. M. Forster, also thought to be closeted homosexuals.

Whether in his satire or fiction, Butler's studies on the evidence for Christianity, his works on evolutionary thought, or in his miscellaneous other writings, a consistent theme runs through, stemming largely from his personal struggle against the stifling of his own nature by his parents, which led him to seek more general principles of growth, development, and purpose: "What concerned him was to establish his nature, his aspirations, and their fulfillment upon a philosophic basis, to identify them with the nature, the aspirations, the fulfillment of all humanity – and, more than that, with the fulfillment of the universe.... His struggle became generalized, symbolic, tremendous.

[20] Butler developed a theory that the Odyssey came from the pen of a young Sicilian woman, and that the scenes of the poem reflected the coast of Sicily (especially the territory of Trapani) and its nearby islands.

He professes, indeed, to be very much of an evolutionist, and in particular one who has taken it upon his shoulders to reinstate Buffon and Erasmus Darwin, and, as a follower of these two, Lamarck, in their rightful place as the most believable explainers of the factors and method of evolution.

"[19] With Henry Festing Jones, Butler composed choral works that Eric Blom characterised as "imitation Handel", although with satirical texts.

[34] George Bernard Shaw wrote in a private letter that the music was invested with "a ridiculously complete command of the Handelian manner and technique.

He was a serious but amateur student of the subjects he undertook, especially religious orthodoxy and evolutionary thought, and his controversial assertions effectively shut him out from both the opposing factions of church and science that played such a large role in late Victorian cultural life: "In those days one was either a religionist or a Darwinian, but he was neither.

"[5] His influence on literature, such as it was, came through The Way of All Flesh, which Butler completed in the 1880s, but left unpublished to protect his family, yet the novel, "begun in 1870 and not touched after 1885, was so modern when it was published in 1903, that it may be said to have started a new school", particularly for its use of psychoanalysis in fiction, which "his treatment of Ernest Pontifex [the hero] foreshadows.

For example, in Frank Herbert's Dune the "Butlerian Jihad" – "in-universe ancient revolt against 'thinking machines' that resulted in their prohibition" – is named after Butler.