Samuel Butler's Erewhon is published anonymously, in…

Many readers believe that its account of a superior subterranean master race and the energy-form called "Vril" is accurate, to the extent that some theosophists accept Bullwer-Lyttons’s book as truth.

Later republished as Vril: the Power of the Coming Race, it will be quite popular in the late nineteenth century, and for a time the word "Vril" will come to be associated with "life-giving elixirs".

The best known use of "Vril" in this context is in the name of Bovril (a blend of Bovine and Vril).

The title of Butler’s Erewhon: or, Over the Range, is also the name of a country, supposedly discovered by the protagonist.

In the novel, it is not revealed in which part of the world Erewhon is, but it is clear that it is a fictional country.

Butler meant the title to be read as the word Nowhere backwards, even though the letters "h" and "w" are transposed, therefore Erewhon is an anagram of nowhere.

The first few chapters of the novel, dealing with the discovery of Erewhon, are in fact based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand where, as a young man, he had worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years (1860–1864) and explored parts of the interior of the South Island, of which he wrote about in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863).

Erewhon satirizes various aspects of Victorian society, including criminal punishment, religion and anthropocentrism.

For example, according to Erewhonian law, offenders are treated as if they were ill, while ill people are looked upon as criminals.

Another feature of Erewhon is the absence of machines; this is due to the widely shared perception by the Erewhonians that they are potentially dangerous.

This last aspect of Erewhon reveals the influence of Charles Darwin's evolution theory; Butler had read On the Origin of Species soon after it was published in 1859.