'The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much as can be expected'. Ernest Pontifex is the awkward but likeable son of a remote and tyrannical clergyman father and a priggish mother. Destined to follow his father into the church, Ernest ends his career as a curate in disaster, and in the gleeful rejection of his parents' respectability and sense of duty. The Way of All Flesh marked a watershed between the Victorian age and the twentieth century. With great humour, irony and honesty, it exploded perceptions of the middle-class nineteenth-century family, in a funny and refreshing depiction of a young man who casts off his background to find his own way in the world.