Clay Lane Blog

On Having the Socks

In Erewhon, apologise by saying you have the socks and everyone will understand.

October 21

On Having the Socks

I have added a new post to the Copy Book, On Having the Socks.

This is a passage from Erewhon (1872), Samuel Butler’s instant bestseller telling of a strange, hidden land and its people much in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Both tales are satires on English society in their author’s day, and both worlds have aspects of utopia and dystopia.

In this extract, the subject is crime and sickness. The Government in Erewhon, we gather, ruthlessly prosecuted the sick, the jobless and the depressed, as harmful to society, but treated thieves, robbers and conmen with sympathy, as the victims of forces beyond their control. Butler’s tale is perhaps better known today for the chapter in which he imagined that dumb machines might one day evolve into thinking machines by a process akin to Natural Selection. That was whimsy too, but in both instances the whimsy is beginning to look more like prophecy.

Erewhon made Butler’s name, but he was never able to recapture its popularity in his later work. He himself believed that the sequel, Erewhon Revisited, was a superior piece of writing but he acknowledged that it had not been a great success. One thing we do learn from it, however, is that the narrator of Erewhon, who in that tale is not named, should be called Higgs.

Erewhon, Butler tells us, should be pronounced as three short syllables, e-re-won. It is an anagram of ‘nowhere’.

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