It was a dark and stormy night...

When Edward Bulwer-Lytton died in 1873 he was one of the most revered and respected writers in England with several best selling novels and a considerable fortune. History, however, has not been kind to Lord Bulwer-Lytton. By the turn of the century his overly romantic style, called “Bulwerese” was regarded as overly florid and thought to detract from his novels. Bulwer-Lytton was regarded as little more than an opportunist preying on the desires of the public by feeding them a precursor to pulp fiction. Today, unfortunately, much of the same holds true. It seems that the most enduring legacy of Edward Bulwer-Lytton is a writing contest parodying the famous opening of his novel, “Paul Clifford,” which begins “It was a dark and stormy night”. The point of the contest is to write the most terrible opening sentence to an imaginary novel. Past winners have tapped in to Bulwer-Lytton’s use of rapid changes in point of view, diffuse language and false sentimentality. Here are the winners from the past. Besides this one sentence Bulwer-Lytton also is credited with having coined the phrases “the pen is mightier than the sword”; “the unwashed mass”; and “pursuit of the almighty dollar”.
To limit our knowledge of Edward Bulwer-Lytton to a handful of quotations would be to gravely error in recognizing one of the most popular and certainly most prolific writers of the Victorian era.
Bulwer was born the 25 May 1803 the youngest of three sons to Elizabeth Barbara Lytton and General William Earle Bulwer. His father passed away in 1807 and his mother moved him and his brothers to London. Edward was a sickly child and so rather than follow his brothers he remained at home with his mother who educated him from an early age. In 1819 after a distinguished childhood of education Edward attended Trinity College at Cambridge but shortly transferred to Trinity Hall in order to avoid attending lectures. Although Bulwer-Lytton had published several volumes of poetry it wasn’t until he met and married Rosina Doyle Wheeler that his work lost its Byronic and derivative qualities. With the marriage of Rosina, Edward’s mother retracted his allowance and he was forced for the first time to work for a living. Edward worked tirelessly and turned out a prodigious amount of works between 1827 and 1837. He published thirteen novels, two long poems, one political pamphlet, four plays, a social history of England, a three-volume history of Athens, and all the tales collected in “The Student” as well as writing for the Edinburgh Review, the Westminster Review, the Monthly Chronicle, the Examiner, and the Literary Gazette. He also edited the New Monthly Magazine for two years. One beneficial result of all this work is that it allowed the young couple to engage in the fashionable world of high living, masquerades and glamour, prestige and politics, fops and dandies that his wife was accustomed to. This world that he moved in was a source for some of Bulwer-Lytton’s early fiction. Unfortunately, given how hard Edward worked there was no room in his life for Rosina and their marriage fell apart and in 1836 they officially separated. To fill the void left by the loss of his wife and children Bulwer-Lytton embarked on a career in Parliament which he continued off and on throughout the rest of his life. When Bulwer-Lytton died he had written some 32 novels and countless other plays, pamphlets, poems, and anonymous treatises. He was one of the most read authors of his time probably second only to Dickens.