Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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The Right Honourable  The Lord Lytton  PC
Secretary of State for the Colonies
In office 5 June 1858 – 11 June 1859
Monarch	Victoria
Prime Minister	The Earl of Derby
Preceded by	Lord Stanley
Succeeded by	The Duke of Newcastle
Born	25 May 1803 (1803-05-25) London
Died	18 January 1873 (1873-01-19)
Nationality	British
Political party	Whig Conservative
Spouse(s)	Rosina Doyle Wheeler (1802–1882)
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity Hall, Cambridge

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC (25 May, 1803–18 January, 1873), was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician. Lord Lytton was a florid, popular writer of his day, who coined such phrases as "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", and the infamous incipit "It was a dark and stormy night."

He was the youngest son of General William Earle Bulwer of Heydon Hall and Wood Dalling, Norfolk and Elizabeth Barbara Lytton, daughter of Richard Warburton Lytton of Knebworth, Hertfordshire. He had two brothers, William Earle Lytton Bulwer (1799–1877) and Henry, afterwards Lord Dalling and Bulwer.

Lord Lytton's original surname was Bulwer, the names 'Earle' and 'Lytton' were middle names. On 20 February 1844 he assumed the name and arms of Lytton by royal licence and his surname then became 'Bulwer-Lytton'. His widowed mother had done the same in 1811. His brothers were always simply surnamed 'Bulwer'.

Life

Lord Lytton's father died when he was four years old, after which his mother moved to London. A delicate and neurotic, but precocious, child, he was sent to various boarding schools, where he was always discontented until a Mr Wallington at Baling encouraged him to publish, at the age of fifteen, an immature work, Ishmael and Other Poems. In 1822 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, but moved shortly afterwards to Trinity Hall, and in 1825 won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for English verse.^[1] In the following year he took his B.A. degree and printed for private circulation a small volume of poems, Weeds and Wild Flowers. He purchased a commission in the army, but sold it again without serving, and in August 1827 married, in opposition to his mother's wishes, Rosina Doyle Wheeler (1802–1882), a famous beauty. Upon their marriage, his mother withdrew his allowance, and he was forced to set to work seriously.^[2]

His writing and his efforts in the political arena took a toll upon his marriage to Rosina, and they were legally separated in 1836. Three years later, she published a novel called Cheveley, or the Man of Honour, in which Lord Lytton (then still surnamed Bulwer) was bitterly caricatured. In June 1858, when her husband was standing as parliamentary candidate for Hertfordshire, she appeared at the hustings and indignantly denounced him. She was consequently placed under restraint as insane, but liberated a few weeks later. This was chronicled in her book A Blighted Life. For years she continued her attacks upon her husband’s character; she would outlive him by nine years. The English Rosicrucian society, founded in 1867 by Robert Wentworth Little, claimed Lord Lytton as their 'Grand Patron', but Lord Lytton wrote a letter to the society complaining that he was 'extremely surprised' by their use of the title, as he had 'never sanctioned such'.^[3] Nevertheless, a number of esoteric groups have continued to claim Bulwer-Lytton as their own, chiefly because some of Lord Lytton's writings—such as the 1842 book Zanoni—have recourse to Rosicrucian and assorted esoteric notions. According to the Fulham Football Club, he once resided in the original Craven Cottage, today the site of their stadium.

Political career

Lord Lytton began his career as a follower of Jeremy Bentham. In 1831 he was elected member for St Ives in Cornwall, after which he was returned for Lincoln in 1832, and sat in Parliament for that city for nine years. He spoke in favour of the Reform Bill, and took the leading part in securing the reduction, after vainly essaying the repeal, of the newspaper stamp duties. His influence was perhaps most keenly felt when, on the Whigs’ dismissal from office in 1834, he issued a pamphlet entitled A Letter to a Late Cabinet Minister on the Crisis. Lord Melbourne, then Prime Minister, offered him a lordship of the admiralty, which he declined as likely to interfere with his activity as an author.

In 1838, then at the height of his popularity, he was created a baronet, and on succeeding to the Knebworth estate in 1843 added Lytton to his surname, under the terms of his mother's will. In 1841, he left Parliament and spent some years in continental travel, reentering the political field in 1852; this time, having differed from the policy of Lord John Russell over the Corn Laws, he stood for Hertfordshire as a Conservative. Lord Lytton held that seat until 1866, when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Lytton, of Knebworth in the County of Hertford. In 1858 he entered Lord Derby's government as Secretary of State for the Colonies, thus serving alongside his old friend Disraeli. In the House of Lords he was comparatively inactive. He took a proprietary interest in the development of the Crown Colony of British Columbia and wrote with great passion to the Royal Engineers upon assigning them their duties there. The former HBC Fort Dallas at Camchin, the confluence of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers, was renamed in his honour by Governor Sir James Douglas in 1858 as Lytton, British Columbia.^[4]

Literary career

Lord Lytton's literary career began in 1820, with the publication of his first book of poems, and spanned much of the nineteenth century. He wrote in a variety of genres, including historical fiction, mystery, romance, the occult, and science fiction.

1849 printing of Pelham with Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) frontispiece: Pelham's electioneering visit to the Revd. Combermere St Quintin, who is surprised at dinner with his family.

In 1828 he attracted general attention with Pelham, a humorous, intimate study of the dandyism of the age which kept gossips busy in identifying characters with public figures of the time. A highly melodramatic sub-plot is interwoven. By 1833, he had reached the height of his popularity with Godolphin, followed by The Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834), The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Rienzi: Last of the Tribunes (1835), and Harold: Last of the Saxon Kings (1848). The Last Days of Pompeii was inspired by the painting on the same subject by Russian painter Karl Briullov (Carlo Brullo) which Bulwer-Lytton saw in Milan. He also wrote The Haunted and the Haunters (1857), also known as The House and the Brain, included by Isaac Asimov in his anthology Tales of the Occult (1989, ed. Prometheus, ISBN 0-87975-531-8) and which also appears in the Horror collection The Wordsworth Book Of Horror Stories (ISBN 1-84022-056-2).

Pelham had been partly inspired by Benjamin Disraeli's first novel Vivian Grey. Lord Lytton was an admirer of Benjamin’s father Isaac D’Israeli, himself a noted literary figure, and had corresponded with him. Lord Lytton and D'Israeli began corresponding themselves in the late 1820s, and met for the first time in March 1830, when D'Israeli dined at Lord Lytton’s house. Also present that evening were Charles Pelham Villiers and Alexander Cockburn. Although young at the time, Villiers went on to an exceptionally long parliamentary career, while Cockburn became Lord Chief Justice of England in 1859. He penned many other works, including The Coming Race (also reprinted as Vril: The Power of the Coming Race), which drew heavily on his interest in the occult and contributed to the birth of the science fiction genre. Some believe the book helped to inspire Nazi mysticism, and it has contributed to Hollow Earth theory. Unquestionably, its story of a subterranean race of men waiting to reclaim the surface is one of the early science fiction novels. His play, Money, was produced at Prince of Wales's Theatre in 1872.

Legacy

Bulwer-Lytton pioneered a style of writing that, while it was very popular in his day, contemporary critics came to consider overly florid and excessively embellished by comparison with the writing styles favoured in modern times. His name lives on in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants supply terrible openings of imaginary novels, inspired by his novel Paul Clifford, which opens with the famous words:

“It was a dark and stormy night”

or to give the sentence in full:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Entrants in the contest seek to capture the rapid changes in point of view, the florid language, and the atmosphere of the full sentence. The shorter form of the opening sentence was popularized by the Peanuts comic strip, in which it usually began Snoopy's sessions with the typewriter. It is also the first sentence of Madeleine L'Engle’s Newbery Medal–winning novel A Wrinkle in Time.

Lord Lytton's most famous quotation is "the pen is mightier than the sword", although in the original piece the phrase is led with the phrase "beneath the rule of men entirely great", in the play Richelieu. He also gave the world the memorable phrase “pursuit of the almighty dollar”. Finally, he is widely credited for "the great unwashed". Unfortunately, many citations claim The Last Days of Pompeii as their source, but perusal of the original work indicates that this is not the case. However, the term "the Unwashed" with the same meaning, appears in The Parisians—"He says that Paris has grown so dirty since the 4 September, that it is only fit for the feet of the Unwashed." "The Parisians", though, was published only in 1872, while William Makepeace Thackeray's novel "Pendennis" (1850) uses the phrase ironically, implying it is of much earlier origin. The Oxford English Dictionary records a reference to "Messrs. the Great Unwashed" in Lytton's Paul Clifford (1830), which may be the earliest instance.

Several of Bulwer-Lytton's novels were made into operas, one of which (Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen, by Richard Wagner) eventually became considerably more famous than the novel on which it was based. Leonora by William Henry Fry, the first opera composed in the United States of America, is from Lord Lytton's novel The Lady of Lyons.

In 1831 Lord Lytton undertook the editorship of the New Monthly but resigned the following year. In 1841, he started the Monthly Chronicle, a semi-scientific magazine. During his career he wrote poetry, prose, and stage plays; his last novel was Kenelm Chillingly, which was in course of publication in Blackwood’s Magazine at the time of his death in 1873. His works of fiction and non-fiction were translated in his day and since then into many languages, including German, Norwegian, Swedish, French, Finnish, and Spanish. His book Ernest Maltravers was the first complete novel from the west to be translated into Japanese in [1878].

Family

Children

He and Rosina Doyle Wheeler had two children:

• Lady Emily Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton (17 June 1828–29 April 1848).
• (Edward) Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (8 November 1831–24 November 1891). Viceroy of British India from 1876 to 1880.

Death and after

Lord Lytton died in January of 1873, without reaching the age of 70, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.^[5] After his death, the incomplete work of history, Athens: Its Rise and Fall was published.

Works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Novels

• Pelham (1828)
• The Disowned (1829)
• Devereux (1829)
• Paul Clifford (1830)
• Eugene Aram (1832)
• Godolphin (1833)
• Falkland (1834)
• The Last Days of Pompeii (1834)
• Rienzi (1835)
• The Student (1835)
• Ernest Maltravers (1837)
• Alice (1838)
• Night and Morning (1841)
• Zanoni (1842)
• The Last of the Barons (1843)
• Lucretia (1846)
• Harold, or The Last of the Saxon Kings (1848)
• The Caxtons (1849)
• My Novel (1853)
• What Will He Do With It? (1859)
• A Strange Story (1862)
• The Coming Race (1871)
• Kennelm Chillingly (1873)

Plays

• The Lady of Lyons (1838)
• Richelieu (1839)
• Money (1840)

See also

• Hollow earth theory

References

Further reading

• Christensen, Allan Conrad. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions, Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1976. ISBN 0820303879.
• Christensen, Allan Conrad, ed. The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections, Newark, Delaware: The University of Delaware Press, 2004. ISBN 0874138566.
• Escott, T. H. S. Edward Bulwer, First Baron Lytton of Knebworth; a Social, Personal, and Political Monograph. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1910.
• Mitchell, L. G. Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters. London; New York: Hambledon and London: Distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ISBN 1852854235.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Sources

• Works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton at Internet Archive

Other

• Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73)
• Dickens or Bulwer? A quiz to tell the difference between their prose.
• John S. Moore's essay on Bulwer-Lytton