memoir of the pseudonymous author, John Pickard Owen.  In the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge, are two copies of the pamphlet with pages cut out; he used these pages in forming the Ms. of The Fair Haven.  To have published this book as by the author of Erewhon would have been to give away the irony and satire.  And he had another reason for not disclosing his name; he remembered that as soon as curiosity about the authorship of Erewhon was satisfied, the weekly sales fell from fifty down to only two or three.  But, as he always talked openly of whatever was in his mind, he soon let out the secret of the authorship of The Fair Haven, and it became advisable to put his name to a second edition.

One result of his submitting the Ms. of Erewhon to Miss Savage was that she thought he ought to write a novel, and urged him to do so.  I have no doubt that he wrote the memoir of John Pickard Owen with the idea of quieting Miss Savage and also as an experiment to ascertain whether he was likely to succeed with a novel.  The result seems to have satisfied him, for, not long after The Fair Haven, he began The Way of All Flesh, sending the Ms. to Miss Savage, as he did everything he wrote, for her approval and putting her into the book as Ernest’s Aunt Alethea.  He continued writing it in the intervals of other work until her death in February, 1885, after which he did not touch it.  It was published in 1903 by Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, his literary executor.

Soon after The Fair Haven Butler began to be aware that his letter in the Press, “Darwin among the Machines,” was descending with further modifications and developing in his mind into a theory about evolution which took shape as Life and Habit; but the writing of this very remarkable and suggestive book was delayed and the painting interrupted by absence from England on business in Canada.  He had been persuaded by a college friend, a member of one of the great banking families, to call in his colonial mortgages and to put the money into several new companies.  He was going to make thirty or forty per cent instead of only ten.  One of these companies was a Canadian undertaking, of which he became a director; it was necessary for someone to go to headquarters and investigate its affairs; he went, and was much occupied by the business for two or three years.  By the beginning of 1876 he had returned finally to London, but most of his money was lost and his financial position for the next ten years caused him very serious anxiety.  His personal expenditure was already so low that it was hardly possible to reduce it, and he set to work at his profession more industriously than ever, hoping to paint something that he could sell, his spare time being occupied with Life and Habit, which was the subject that really interested him more deeply than any other.