The Way of All Flesh is Samuel Butler's novel of the Pontifex family, written between 1873 and 1884 and published in 1903, the year after his death. Its family tree runs across four generations, from old John Pontifex, a carpenter at Paleham, to his great-grandson Ernest, and it is built to show one thing: how a father's harshness passes down the male line. The narrator, Edward Overton, is a family friend from Paleham and Ernest's godfather, so the tree is seen from just outside it.
The line turns on George Pontifex, John's son, who goes to London to his uncle's publishing house and grows rich publishing religious books. George rules his children with money and the threat of disinheritance. His elder son John inherits the business; his younger son Theobald is pressed into holy orders against his inclination, serves as curate to Mr Allaby at Crampsford, and marries one of the Allaby daughters, Christina, who with her sisters had played cards for the chance of him. As rector of Battersby, Theobald repeats his father's rule on his own children, Ernest, Joseph and Charlotte.
Ernest's way out comes through his aunt Alethea, George's youngest daughter and the one warm adult in his family. She befriends him at school in Roughborough and, dying before he comes of age, leaves her fortune in trust to him through Overton, to be his at twenty-eight. Before that, Ernest is ordained, imprisoned, and marries Ellen, a former housemaid at Battersby, only to learn that she was already married to John, his father's coachman, which makes the marriage void. He sends their children, Georgie and Alice, to be raised by a bargeman's family rather than repeat his own upbringing.
Butler drew the Pontifexes closely from his own family: like Ernest, Butler was the son of a clergyman; Butler was also the grandson of a bishop, and he resisted the path set for him. He left the novel unpublished in his lifetime, and it appeared after his death, edited by his friend R. A. Streatfeild. This tree follows the published novel, whose characters are fictional. It matters because the book made the family itself its subject, and its attack on Victorian fatherhood shaped the twentieth-century novel of generations.
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