'Our mad correspondent': The Canterbury writer who predicted AI and email

Saturday, 30 May 2026

As The Press turns 165, we take a closer look at one of its most famous and unusual contributors. See more coverage related to The Press’s 165th anniversary here.

Samuel Butler had been in Canterbury for more than a year when his letters home to England were compiled in book form. Naturally enough, the book was titled A First Year in Canterbury Settlement.

So far, so simple. But who would review the book for The Press, the settlement’s relatively new newspaper? None other than Butler himself. Crazier still, the author gave himself a bad review.

It ran on page two of the paper on October 28, 1863. Perhaps it was a slow news day in the new settlement. The review ran under the paper’s masthead without a byline, as though it was an editorial.

“Who Mr Butler may be we have not the remotest conception,” The Press declared, before slamming the book as “crude and wholly destitute of method”, with “numerous” faults in style and “excruciatingly tedious” details.

That Butler almost certainly wrote this self-lacerating review of his own work is just one of the discoveries made by retired academic and Butler expert Roger Robinson in his new book, Haunted by Erewhon. It was known that Butler wrote under pseudonyms for The Press during his four years in New Zealand. Parts of his famous book Erewhon first appeared in the paper. But no-one quite knew the extent of it.

The self-deprecation is one clue, and Robinson can also recognise the sound and rhythm of his writing after more than five decades reading Butler. There was another amusing example a little over a month later, when Butler represented The Press at the grand opening of the railway to Ferrymead as well as reporting on it.

“He spoke in such a low tone that we could hardly hear him,” Butler apparently wrote of himself.

While you might be tempted to think this was a prank or an in-joke that would have been laughed about back in the newspaper office, Robinson suggests something else.

He thinks it reflected Butler’s unusual personality.

“One of the things that made him good at journalism was he had this weird mix of being really provocative, with world-shaking radical ideas, but at the same time he was a very vulnerable personality,” he says. “Probably because his dad had beaten him up from the age of 2. But he didn’t like putting his name up there. He hardly ever wrote under his own name until he got back to England.”

Yet it was Canterbury that made Butler a writer, and Robinson shows how. He is calling his new book a co-authored biography, which means he has reassembled Butler’s own published and unpublished words to create a narrative of his life, especially from 1860, when he landed at Lyttelton, to 1864, when he sailed back to England.

The Canterbury spirit

Born in 1835, Butler was a clergyman’s son who studied Classics at Cambridge but emigrated rather than go into the priesthood. Arriving in New Zealand he bought land at South Canterbury and called his sheep farm Mesopotamia. He explored and named places no Pākehā had yet named. He came close to discovering Arthur’s Pass.

But South Canterbury was remote from civilisation and he spent increasing amounts of time in Christchurch, where he became enmeshed in local society. He wrote for The Press. He stayed at the Christchurch Club. He was a Classics examiner at Christ’s College.

It was an encounter with Charles Darwin that motivated his journalism. On the Origin of Species had been out for three years and was still radical when he reviewed it in a novel way in The Press. He set it up as a dialogue between C and F. One was pro-Darwin and the other was against, but they were both Butler.

Some other Press pieces were prescient. His “Darwin Among the Machines” warned of a world in which we might work for the machines, rather than the machines working for us. It became a starting point for Erewhon, but Robinson sees it as relevant in a time of artificial intelligence.

Butler wrote about a “noiseless telegraph” that could communicate globally and immediately. It was as though he predicted email in the 1860s. The Press attributed that idea to “our mad correspondent”.

Robinson pictures Butler within a coterie or school of journalists around Press founder James FitzGerald in a quickly growing city. Yes, they were literary and high-minded, “and they were conscious of trying to establish a culture”, but it was still a newspaper and there were pages to fill. Robinson is also convinced Butler wrote a lot of letters to the editor.

“It must have been a great time.”

The book Erewhon was published in 1872. The title is almost “nowhere” backwards. As a satire set in an imagined world, it is one of what Robinson calls “the big four” in that genre, along with Thomas More’s Utopia, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He adds a more recent fifth, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Erewhon is sometimes compared to Anno Domini 2000. Often called New Zealand’s first science fiction novel, this book about an utopian world where women were in charge was published in 1889. Its author was former Prime Minister Julius Vogel.

“It’s like an endless bad Italian opera,” Robinson says of Vogel’s book. “Great ideas but terrible writing.”

While few remember that, Erewhon has never been out of print.

“In some ways it’s a tough read,” Robinson says. “But the narrative part is just fabulous. A lot of the stuff about the mountains I took straight out of that.”

He would like to see Erewhon accepted as a work of New Zealand literature, and Butler considered as a New Zealand writer. After all, he notes provocatively, Butler spent more of his adult life in New Zealand than Katherine Mansfield did.

Robinson’s Butler was a shrewd observer, liberal on race relations and insightful in the strange ways Canterbury copied England and the ways it differed.

Butler identified a Canterbury spirit that was at odds with the “derivative Britannia” he expected: “Men are shrewd and sensible, alive to the humorous, and hard-headed. There is little conventionalism, little formality, and much liberality of sentiment.”

A courtship and a confession

Some other mysteries about Butler have been solved, or gaps filled.

Robinson found that far from being a nerdy outsider at school, or in his own words “a muff, a mollycoddle”, Butler was popular and active in a rebellious school running team.

New light is also shed on Butler’s unsuccessful courtship of Mary Brittan, the teenage daughter of prominent Cantabrian and early Press editor Joseph Brittan.

Butler’s relationship with Mary came to a sudden end in early 1862. What happened? Robinson’s investigative work has concluded that the courtship could not survive the sudden death of Mary’s older brother, Arthur. It was New Year’s Day and Arthur drowned after being tangled in watercress in the Avon.

Devout Christians, the Brittans took solace in their faith. Butler was a notorious atheist in the Anglican settlement.

“I couldn’t imagine that a 17-year-old girl in that state of mind could tolerate the courtship of an atheist,” Robinson says.

Mary Brittan went on to marry politician William Rolleston.

In his reconstruction, Robinson has Butler and Mary arguing about religion. He took Butler’s side of the argument verbatim from several sources. Mary looked forward to an afterlife in which she would see Arthur again. Butler refused to accept it.

Another major discovery gave Robinson’s book its title. He was in the British Library, examining the original manuscript of Erewhon, when he saw words Butler had crossed out. He borrowed a magnifying glass and recovered them.

They said: “There are certain places that haunt you for your life, and so this for myself.”

That confirmed Robinson’s hunch that New Zealand had been more important to Butler than anyone had said, or Butler had ever said openly. The conceit of Robinson’s book is that Butler is composing the book on his death bed in London in 1902, still haunted.

“It’s quite a confession.”

The running man

Robinson lives half the year in Wellington and in early May he was over the Remutaka Range in Featherston, where he did two sessions at the increasingly popular Featherston Booktown festival.

“The festival takes over the whole place and yet it’s still a town in its own right,” he says. “There’s a great atmosphere.”

There was a session in a bookshop called the Dickensian, where “I did the complete works of Dickens in 45 minutes”.

There was also a session on Butler with his old friend and Booktown founder and chairperson Peter Biggs.

Usually Robinson would be in North America at this time of year. As well as having a distinguished academic career at Canterbury and Victoria universities, the avuncular 87-year-old has had another life in what he calls “the running industry”. He has been a marathon runner and race commentator, and half of a running power couple. He describes his American wife, Kathrine Switzer, as “an iconic figure in the running world”. She was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, back when it was illegal for women to do so.

As well as running, Robinson has written about it. He says he is in the middle of negotiating a book on “the history of the running movement” with Bloomsbury. In 2025, he won the George Hirsch Journalism Award in New York, given to writers who have made significant contributions to writing about running.

He was the first non-American to win it. The citation said his post-9/11 essay, “A Run in Central Park”, stands as “one of the finest literary responses to that tragedy”.

Robinson’s fitness also made him an ideal candidate to write about Butler, as he notes in his introduction.

“I have actively followed his very active footsteps for 50 years. I have walked where Sam walked and seen what he saw. Typically, it was spectacularly mountainous. Not many other ageing biographers could have kept up.”

Butler’s mistake

There is another, more obvious affinity. This is the story of an Englishman in New Zealand. If Robinson had to put a starting date on Haunted by Erewhon, he would say it was 1972.

He arrived in New Zealand four years earlier and was teaching at the University of Canterbury. Butler’s posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh was on the course he taught. But then 1972 rolled along. It was the centenary of Erewhon.

Robinson put on a symposium. There were speakers from various fields related to Butler: English, science, music and classics. There was art at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.

Robinson continued to gather Butler material over the years that followed, with an eye on references to New Zealand. Running trips to the US and family visits to the UK became opportunities to pop into reference libraries and collections.

“I didn’t want to do just another literary biography that almost nobody would read. When I figured out that I could do the whole thing in his voice, that was the big breakthrough.

“It seems to really work. At least he gets to do all the talking.”

But is someone else talking?

Robinson sees sadness or a lost opportunity in Butler. He was becoming involved in Christchurch life when he abruptly left. Robinson took the other path.

“In my case, there came a point when I suddenly realised I was associating much more with Christchurch than I was with England.”

Butler could have stayed here and had a great career as a journalist.

“I seriously believe he made a mistake in going back to England. He had these brilliant ideas. The idea that The Odyssey was written by a young woman. Or that Shakespeare’s gay mates trapped him in a kind of practical joke sex trap. These would have been brilliant journalistic stories. But the way he set them up, they were these serious, scholarly, plodding things with a 12-line title.”

Butler’s Odyssey book was called The Authoress of the Odyssey. The Shakespeare one was Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered. His translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey became mass market paperbacks a century later, when they were out of copyright.

Robinson sees Butler trying to be accepted in the scholarly world when he would have been more comfortable in the daily life of newspaper journalism.

“He should have been in Christchurch writing a column for The Press. His writing was really quite plain and direct and pithy and shit-stirring. It had quite a modern ring to it.”

But traces of Butler remain here, apart from the story of Mesopotamia. He named other places, including the Two Thumb Range between Mesopotamia and Lake Tekapo. That feature has since lent its name to a chain of pubs in Christchurch.

“I was there a year or two ago,” Robinson says. “Some of my running mates put on a party for me and I was busy telling the barman that this was named after something from Samuel Butler. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested.”

Perhaps that could become another unexpected tribute to Butler. The book shows how a new land presented great opportunities for a bright Englishman. Which is where it gets personal for Robinson.

“New Zealand in my lifetime has been like that,” he says. “The book is in a way my letter of gratitude or something to New Zealand. I won’t put it quite as strongly as a love letter but I think my life has been much richer for staying here. As Butler’s would have been.

“I’m so glad I didn’t go back.”

HAUNTED BY EREWHON is published by Steele Roberts, $35.