Narrated by the family friend Overton, the book traces the Pontifex line from a contented village carpenter to his bullying, prosperous son and the tyrannical clergyman Theobald, then follows Theobald’s son Ernest through a beaten childhood, school and Cambridge, ordination and a series of disasters as he slowly unlearns everything he was taught. Butler wrote it between 1872 and 1884 and left it unpublished.
Published only after his death in 1903, it became a founding text for the generation that rebelled against the Victorians. Download the free EPUB.