The opening of Erewhon is based upon Butler’s colonial experiences; some of the descriptions remind one of passages in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, where he speaks of the excursions he made with Doctor when looking for sheep-country.  The walk over the range as far as the statues is taken from the Upper Rangitata district, with some alterations; but the walk down from the statues into Erewhon is reminiscent of the Leventina Valley in the Canton Ticino.  The great chords, which are like the music moaned by the statues, are from the prelude to the first of Handel’s Trois Lecons; he used to say: 

“One feels them in the diaphragm—­they are, as it were, the groaning and labouring of all creation travailing together until now.”

There is a place in New Zealand named Erewhon, after the book; it is marked on the large maps, a township about fifty miles west of Napier in the Hawke Bay Province (North Island).  I am told that people in New Zealand sometimes call their houses Erewhon and occasionally spell the word Erehwon which Butler did not intend; he treated wh as a single letter, as one would treat th.  Among other traces of Erewhon now existing in real life are Butler’s Stones on the Hokitika Pass, so called because of a legend that they were in his mind when he described the statues.

The book was translated into Dutch in 1873 and into German in 1897.

Butler wrote to Charles Darwin to explain what he meant by the “Book of the Machines”:  “I am sincerely sorry that some of the critics should have thought I was laughing at your theory, a thing which I never meant to do and should be shocked at having done.”  Soon after this Butler was invited to Down and paid two visits to Mr. Darwin there; he thus became acquainted with all the family and for some years was on intimate terms with Mr. (now Sir) Francis Darwin.

It is easy to see by the light of subsequent events that we should probably have had something not unlike Erewhon sooner or later, even without the Russian lady and Sir F. N. Broome, to whose promptings, owing to a certain diffidence which never left him, he was perhaps inclined to attribute too much importance.  But he would not have agreed with this view at the time; he looked upon himself as a painter and upon Erewhon as an interruption.  It had come, like one of those creatures from the Land of the Unborn, pestering him and refusing to leave him at peace until he consented to give it bodily shape.  It was only a little one, and he saw no likelihood of its having any successors.  So he satisfied its demands and then, supposing that he had written himself out, looked forward to a future in which nothing should interfere with the painting.  Nevertheless, when another of the unborn came teasing him he yielded to its importunities and allowed himself to become the author of The Fair Haven, which is his pamphlet on the Resurrection, enlarged and preceded by a realistic