George Mallory introduced Graves to the works of the satirist Samuel Butler (1835-1902). In March 1916, Graves wrote to Edward Marsh about Butler’s Utopian satire Erewhon, his posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh, and his iconoclastic publications on Christianity and Homer’s Iliad:
‘It’s astonishing how Butler overshadows and colours all life for me; never a day passes but I think of him in a score of connexions just as Handel overshadowed and coloured life for Butler himself.’
This edition of Erewhon, illustrated by Robert Gibbings, is published by Jonathan Cape, who also published books by Graves.