The project has brought Butler’s prodigious intellect sharply into focus.
Roger Robinson is a specialist in 19th-century literature. He’s also a distinguished long-distance runner who writes about running. When he stands up to talk about the maverick polymath Samuel Butler (1835-1902) on Saturday 11 May, he will add another strand to what is already known about Butler as a writer, artist, photographer, composer and sheep farmer. Robinson has discovered that Butler was also a talented runner – an ability he may have deliberately downplayed in an attempt to portray his schoolboy self as a miserable “mollycoddle”.
Best known for his fantastical novel Erewhon (nowhere spelt backwards – or almost), Butler was an iconoclast who defied his family’s wishes, attacked the establishment, and famously proposed that the Odyssey was written by a woman. The event at which Robinson will be speaking, along with the journalist and broadcaster Simon Heffer, celebrates the culmination of a two-year project to catalogue the Samuel Butler Collection held in the Old Library at St John’s College. The project has brought Butler’s prodigious intellect sharply into focus and its online resource will help make the collection accessible to a new generation of scholars and other interested parties worldwide.
Read the full story
Image: Samuel Butler (centre) with his undergraduate friends - "The Best Set" - c.1855.
Credit: By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
________________________________________________