Samuel Butler’s Criticism on British Education of the Victorian Age

DOI: https://doi.org/10.62517/jhet.202515209

Author(s)

Jianguo Liu

Affiliation(s)

Department of English, University of Sanya, Sanya, Hainan, China

Abstract

Samuel Butler is one of the three great novelists in the latter part of the nineteenth century. He criticized many fields of the British society, especially that of the British education which was important in the Victorian Age. Butler resented the English educational system as a whole only because he had suffered too much from it and had seen too many other people who suffered from it. In his masterpiece The Way of All Flesh Butler presented a very detailed account of the life the protagonist who suffered too much from family education, public school education and university education. The paper is an attempt to explore Butler’s criticism on the pernicious aspects of the Victorian family education, public school education, and university education in order to send some social message that Samuel Butler’s works may bring to the world today.

Keywords

Samuel Butler; The Way Of All Flesh; Victorian Age; Family Education; Public School Education; University Education

References

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