Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino

From the opening

THE publication of a new and revised edition of “Alps and Sanctuaries” at a much reduced price and in a handier and more portable form than the original will, I hope, draw general attention to a book which has been undeservedly neglected. “Alps and Sanctuaries” has hitherto been the Cinderella of the Butler family. While her sisters, both elder and younger, have been steadily winning their way to high places at the feast, she has sat unrecognised and unhonoured in the ashes. For this, of course, the high price of the book, which was originally issued at a guinea, was largely responsible, as well as its unmanageable size and cumbrousness. But Time has revenges in his wallet for books as well as for men, and I cannot but believe that a new life is in store for one of the wisest, wittiest and tenderest of Butler’s books.

“Alps and Sanctuaries” originally appeared at a time (1881) when the circle of Butler’s readers had shrunk to very narrow dimensions. “Erewhon” (1872) had astonished and delighted the literary world, but “The Fair Haven” (1873) had alienated the sympathies of the orthodox, and “Life and Habit” (1877) and its successors “Evolution, Old and New” (1879) and “Unconscious Memory” (1880) had made him powerful and relentless enemies in the field of science. In 1881 Butler was, as he often termed himself, a literary pariah, and “Alps and Sanctuaries” was received for the most part with contemptuous silence or undisguised hostility. Now that Butler is a recognised classic, his twentieth-century readers may care to be reminded of the reception that was accorded to this—one of the most genial and least polemical of his works. Very few papers reviewed it at all, and in only four or five cases was it honoured with a notice more than a few lines long.

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