This is the Penguin English Library Edition" of " The Way of All Flesh" by Samuel Butler. The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family it is as much as can be expected. Written with great humour irony & honesty " The Way of All Flesh" exploded perceptions of the Victorian middle-class family in its radical depiction of Ernest Pontifex a young man who casts off his background & discovers himself. The awkward but likeable son of a tyrannical clergyman & a priggish mother & destined to follow his father into the church Ernest gleefully rejects his parents respectability & chooses instead to find his own way in the world. " The Penguin English Library" contains 100 editions of the best fiction in English from the eighteenth century & the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War."