Butler wrote to Charles Darwin to explain what he meant by the "Book
of the Machines": "I am sincerely sorry that some of the critics
should have thought I was laughing at your theory, a thing which I
never meant to do and should be shocked at having done." Soon after
this Butler was invited to Down and paid two visits to Mr. Darwin
there; he thus became acquainted with all the family and for some
years was on intimate terms with Mr. (now Sir) Francis Darwin.

It is easy to see by the light of subsequent events that we should
probably have had something not unlike 'Erewhon' sooner or later,
even without the Russian lady and Sir F. N. Broome, to whose
promptings, owing to a certain diffidence which never left him, he
was perhaps inclined to attribute too much importance. But he would
not have agreed with this view at the time; he looked upon himself as
a painter and upon 'Erewhon' as an interruption. It had come, like
one of those creatures from the Land of the Unborn, pestering him and
refusing to leave him at peace until he consented to give it bodily
shape. It was only a little one, and he saw no likelihood of its
having any successors. So he satisfied its demands and then,
supposing that he had written himself out, looked forward to a future
in which nothing should interfere with the painting. Nevertheless,
when another of the unborn came teasing him he yielded to its
importunities and allowed himself to become the author of 'The Fair
Haven', which is his pamphlet on the Resurrection, enlarged and
preceded by a realistic memoir of the pseudonymous author, John
Pickard Owen. In the library of St. John's College, Cambridge, are
two copies of the pamphlet with pages cut out; he used these pages in
forming the MS. of 'The Fair Haven'. To have published this book as
by the author of 'Erewhon' would have been to give away the irony and