Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His SonButler, Samuel
Philosophy
Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His Son
Butler, Samuel
Satire; Utopian fiction; Utopias -- Fiction
Returning for a moment to my father’s old Erewhonian dress, I should
say that he had preserved it simply as a memento and without any idea
that he should again want it. It was not the court dress that had been
provided for him on the occasion of his visit to the king and queen,
but the everyday clothing that he had been ordered to wear when he was
put in prison, though his English coat, waistcoat, and trousers had
been allowed to remain in his own possession. These, I had seen from
his book, had been presented by him to the queen (with the exception of
two buttons, which he had given to Yram as a keepsake), and had been
preserved by her displayed upon a wooden dummy. The dress in which he
escaped had been soiled during the hours that he and my mother had been
in the sea, and had also suffered from neglect during the years of
his poverty; but he wished to pass himself off as a common peasant or
working-man, so he preferred to have it set in order as might best be
done, rather than copied.
So cautious was he in the matter of dress that he took with him the
boots he had worn on leaving Erewhon, lest the foreign make of his
English boots should arouse suspicion. They were nearly new, and when
he had had them softened and well greased, he found he could still wear
them quite comfortably.
But to return. He reached home late at night one day at the beginning
of February, and a glance was enough to show that he was an altered
man. “What is the matter?” said I, shocked at his appearance. “Did you
go to Erewhon, and were you ill-treated there?”
“I went to Erewhon,” he said, “and I was not ill-treated there, but I
have been so shaken that I fear I shall quite lose my reason. Do not
ask me more now. I will tell you about it all to-morrow. Let me have
something to eat, and go to bed.”
When we met at breakfast next morning, he greeted me with all his usual
warmth of affection, but he was still taciturn. “I will begin to tell
you about it,” he said, “after breakfast. Where is your dear mother?
How was it that I have . . . ”
Then of a sudden his memory returned, and he burst into tears.
I now saw, to my horror, that his mind was gone. When he recovered, he
said: “It has all come back again, but at times now I am a blank, and
every week am more and more so. I daresay I shall be sensible now for
several hours. We will go into the study after breakfast, and I will
talk to you as long as I can do so.”
Let the reader spare me, and let me spare the reader any description of
what we both of us felt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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