Erewhon

Getting down to make his fortune in a far-off nation, a younger traveller discovers the distant and delightful land of Erewhon and is given a house amongst its terribly good-looking residents. However their customer quickly discovers that this seemingly ideally suited neighborhood has its faults – right here crime is handled indulgently as a illness to be cured, whereas sickness, poverty and misfortune are cruelly punished, and all machines have been superstitiously destroyed after a weird prophecy. Can he survive in a world the place morality is turned the wrong way up? Impressed by Samuel Butler’s years in colonial New Zealand and by his studying of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Erewhon (1872) is a extremely authentic, irreverent and humorous satire on standard virtues, spiritual hypocrisy and the unthinking acceptance of beliefs.