Witten with grat humour, irony and honesty, The Way of All Flesh exploded perceptions of the Victorian middle-class family in its radical depiction of Ernest Ponitfex, a young man who casts off his background and discovers himself.

The awkward but likeable son of a tyrannical clergyman and a priggish mother, destined to follow his father into the church, Ernest gleefully rejects his parents' respectabilitu and chooses instead to find his own way in the world.