Books: Victorian Father & Son

SAMUEL BUTLER (242 pp.)—Philip Henderson—Indiana University ($3.75).

"A man first quarrels with his father about three quarters of a year before he is born. It is then he insists on setting up a separate establishment." With this provocative generalization, written 80 years ago in The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler not only supplied the main clue to his own character but set hissing the long fuse at whose other end stood that grand, portentous chunk of dynamite, the Victorian father. But Butler's masterpiece was only published after his death (1902), and it was not until the rebellious '20s that his Way...