Erewhonville, man

English novelist Samuel Butler was born on this day in 1835.

In Butler’s most well-known work, the utopian (or dystopian – it’s not always clear) novel, Erewhon, published anonymously in 1872, a traveler named Higgs claims to have visited an undiscovered country, named Erewhon. (Nowhere spelled backwards, or almost.) The book is Butler’s critique of Victorian England.

Narrator Higgs explains the Erewhonians' attitude toward death.

"The Erewhonians regard death with less abhorrence than disease. They insist that the greater number of those who are commonly said to die, have never yet been born--not, at least, into that unseen world which is alone worthy of consideration.”  Can we get a shout-out to Plato? Or maybe Jesus visited Erewhon before Higgs did, during those “missing years.”

In Erewhon, death is no big deal. "The mere knowledge that we shall one day die does not make us very unhappy; no one thinks that he or she will escape, so that none are disappointed.  And why would they be disappointed, since they’ll be headed to that invisible world that is worthy of consideration?

The denizens of Erewhon, Higgs says, "do not put up monuments, or write epitaphs, but they have a custom which comes to much the same thing, for the instinct of preserving the name alive after the death of the body seems to be common to all mankind. They have statues of themselves made while they are still alive (those, that is, who can afford it), and write inscriptions under them, which are often quite as untruthful as are our own epitaphs…”  And why not? Why leave it to someone else to sing our praises? Who among us non-Erewhonians, listening in on our funerals, would be wholly satisfied with the eulogies? Nothing to be done at that point.

"If a person is ugly,” Higgs goes on, “he does not sit as a model for his own statue, although it bears his name. He gets the handsomest of his friends to sit for him, and one of the ways of paying a compliment to another is to ask him to sit for such a statue. Women generally sit for their own statues, from a natural disinclination to admit the superior beauty of a friend, but they expect to be idealised.” The first law of Nature is self-preservation, so be sure and put your best self forward.

Higgs describes the admirable post-death ritual practiced in Erewhon:

"When any one dies, the friends of the family write no letters of condolence, neither do they attend the scattering, nor wear mourning, but they send little boxes filled with artificial tears, and with the name of the sender painted neatly upon the outside of the lid. The tears vary in number from two to fifteen or sixteen, according to degree of intimacy or relationship; and people sometimes find it a nice point of etiquette to know the exact number they ought to send.” (So if sextuplets died, one could theoretically send 96 tears.)

"Strange as it may appear, this attention is highly valued, and its omission by those from whom it might be expected is keenly felt. These tears were formerly stuck with adhesive plaster to the cheeks of the bereaved, and were worn in public for a few months after the death of a relative; they were then banished to the hat or bonnet, and are now no longer worn."

Butler himself died at age 66, in a nursing home in London. His body was cremated (his wish) and the ashes either dispersed or buried in an unmarked grave. There would have been precious few ever to send, or shed, a tear in his memory, had a manuscript of his other famous work, The Way of All Flesh, not been found in a drawer in 1903, leading to a revival and a subsequent intensity of interest in Butler’s works -- a return from the dead.