Life and Habit
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in nineteenth-century intellectual history and natural history writing
- Readers who enjoy speculative essays and are willing to read slowly and annotate
- Humanities scholars studying the spread of evolutionary ideas and popular scientific writing
- Advanced readers who wish to encounter a classic scientific text in the original English
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting a systematic modern biology textbook or experimental data
- Readers who prefer fast-paced, plot-driven works
- Those with limited stamina for English reading and unaccustomed to Victorian argumentative prose
Reading tips
- Read the table of contents and introduction first to grasp the author's core arguments before entering the main text
- After each chapter, summarize the chain of argument in one or two sentences to avoid being overwhelmed by long sentences
- Read against background materials on the science of Darwin's era to understand the argumentative context
- Use the eBook's search function to mark key concepts for easy review and organization
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) was a British novelist and essayist. Born into a clergyman's family in Nottinghamshire, he graduated from Cambridge University and later went to New Zealand to run a sheep station. He is known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon and the posthumously published autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh. The former uses an imaginary country as a mirror to critique Victorian education, religion, and morality, while the latter examines growth and family relations through a family narrative. He also wrote Erewhon Revisited, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey, and works on life, art, science, evolution, and memory, spanning fiction, essays, and intellectual commentary, often with an ironic and skeptical tone.
