Samuel Butler “Edgin, or Beyond the Mountains” M:. libra, 2023

In the same year that The Secret of the Sea was published, the classic Victorian writer Samuel Butler passed away. His 1872 novel, Erewhon: or, Beyond the Mountains, was described in older literature textbooks as a satire on the bourgeoisie, but this is, of course, a cliché. Formally a dystopia, Erewhon (an anagram of "Nowhere") addresses not so much the problems of Butler's contemporary England as the prospects of society as a whole. The narrator accidentally finds himself in a non-existent country, and the perspective of an outsider helps him appreciate how "inverted," like the novel's title suggests, human notions of law, life, death, love, and even technological progress can be.
"But how incredibly lucky I was! If I had reached the pass five minutes later, the passage between the glaciers would have already been blocked by cloud, and I wouldn't have even known it existed."

