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P. N. Furbank is Emeritus Professor of the Open University and author of Samuel Butler: 1835-1902. Other publications include E. M. Forster: A Life; Italo Svevo: the Man and the Writer; Unholy Pleasure: the Idea of Social Class and, most recently, Diderot: A Critical Biography.

Samuel Butler was among the most wide-ranging of the accomplished crew of late Victorian writers to which be belonged -- a forceful controversialist in the debates that surrounded Darwin's theory of evolution, a painter who sometimes exhibited at the Royal Academy, an idiosyncratic critic and a gifted travel writer, and even, in his early years, a