off at the railway station in early 1895, and Butler subsequently wrote an emotional poem, "In Memoriam H. R. F.," instructing his literary agent to offer it for publication to several leading English magazines. However, once the Oscar Wilde trial began in the spring of that year, with revelations of homosexual behaviour among the literati, Butler feared being associated with the widely reported scandal and in a panic wrote to all the magazines, withdrawing his poem. A number of critics, beginning with Malcolm Muggeridge in The Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler (1936), concluded that Butler was a sublimated or repressed homosexual and that his lifelong status as an "incarnate bachelor" was comparable to that of his writer contemporaries Walter Pater, Henry James, and E. M. Forster, also assumed to be closeted homosexuals. Literary history and criticism Butler developed a theory that the Odyssey came from the pen of a young Sicilian woman, and that the scenes of the poem reflected the coast of Sicily (especially the territory of Trapani) and its nearby islands. He described his evidence for this in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) and in the introduction and footnotes to his prose translation of the Odyssey (1900). Robert Graves elaborated on the hypothesis in his novel Homer's Daughter. Butler argued in a lecture entitled "The Humour of Homer", delivered at The Working Men's College in London, 1892, that Homer's deities in the Iliad are like humans, but "without the virtue", and that he "must have desired his listeners not to take them seriously." Butler translated the Iliad (1898). His other works include Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered (1899), a theory that the sonnets, if rearranged, tell a story about a homosexual affair. The English novelist Aldous Huxley acknowledged the influence of Erewhon on his novel Brave New World. Huxley's Utopian counterpart to Brave New World, Island, also refers prominently to Erewhon. In From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun asks, "Could a man do more to bewilder the public?" Assessment Butler belonged to no literary school and spawned no followers in his lifetime. He was a serious but amateur student of the subjects he undertook, especially religious orthodoxy and evolutionary thought, and his controversial assertions effectively shut him out from both the opposing factions of church and science that played such a large role in late Victorian cultural life: "In those days one was either a religionist or