Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Autograph Letter Signed dated May 4, 1862. Paper and signature are in good condition, mounting removal traces on reverse, some foxing.

Reads in part:

Buxton
May 4, 1862

Dear Mrs. ______

I am very much obliged by your kind note. I have been out of town for a fortnight & count on staying here about a fortnight longer & being then in town till the middle of June.

I am glad to hear Sir Patrick is well. The islands I am told make a good show in the exhibition.

Yrs truly,
EB Lytton

EDWARD GEORGE EARLE LYTTON BULWER-LYTTON, 1st Baron Lytton (1803-1873) 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." Despite his popularity in his heyday, today his name is known as a byword for bad writing. San Jose State University's annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing is named after him.

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.

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. His 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.

In 1828 Lytton 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 (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.

Although he was popular in his day, Lord Lytton's prose strikes many contemporary readers as anachronistic and overly embellished, though at least one of his works (The Last Days of Pompeii) is still regularly read.

His name lives on in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants have to 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 its full glory:

"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.

 

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