Samuel Butler claims to have spent 10 years writing his first novel, which emerged as a masterpiece of social and religious satire. The delay was partly due to the fact that it was composed on Sundays while the rest of Butler`s weeks were devoted to what he felt at the time was his true calling: painting. Borrowing the landscape of New Zealand and adopting ideas from articles Butler had written for magazines in response to Darwin`s evolutionary theories, Butler created the strange race of Erewhonians who have forbidden the use of machines, who treat their sick like criminals and their criminals like sick people, who suppress originality and hold that the greatest scholarly achievement is proficiency in the study of unreason and hypothetics.