Erik Visits a (Non) American Grave, Part 2,063

This is the grave of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Born in 1803 in London, Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton had a name truly of the English upper classes. This was old money in his parents, especially on his mother’s side. But his father died when he was only 4. He didn’t have any financial worries, got good schooling, had fancy tutors, and ended up at Cambridge. What he really cared about was poetry and then prose.

Bulwer-Lytton published some bad poems when he was a teen that he tried to forget about. In 1827, he published Falkland, a Gothic novella that was popular in Germany, but less so at home. But Pelham, a novel he published in 1828, made him a star. It’s the kind of thing that was popular at this time in England–stories of rich dandies and their goings on that satirized high society. The novel does go gothic toward its end as well. It’s also a detective story–a man gets murdered and our protagonist has to figure out who really did so his friend doesn’t hang. The combination of satire and Gothic horror about the streets of London made him very popular.

The 1830s saw Bulwer-Lytton enjoy his status as one of the most popular authors in the UK. Book after book were among the most popular of his time. The Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834), Rienzi: The Last of the Tribunes (1835), and Ernest Maltravers (1837) are among them. Maybe the most well-known is The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), based on the Karl Briullov painting that he had seen while traveling in Milan, and which explores, well, the last days of Pompeii before it was destroyed by Vesuvius in 79. This worked for Bulwer-Lytton because of his interest in portraying the decadence of Rome, common in his fiction and big in the romantic fiction of the era more broadly.

At the same time, Bulwer-Lytton had decided to go into politics too. In his early days, he was a big follower of Jeremy Bentham’s ideas and thus was a big supporter of the reform bills bringing some semblance of democracy to the British in that decade. He won a seat in Cornwall and then Lincolnshire and was in Parliament from 1831 until 1841. Within this larger project of reform, his personal issue was repealing newspaper stamp duties, which many called a “tax on knowledge” and of course is known to Americans as the central principle of the Stamp Act back in 1765 that so angered the colonists. This became a major issue in the reform movement since they did not want to get any kind of government approval on their newspapers and other documents. Its supporters started daring the government to enforce by simply refusing to cooperate and printing stuff without the stamps. In fact, the government was willing to enforce it and jailed around 800 people for violations in the early 1830s. Bulwer-Lytton pushed for its abolition and he didn’t get that, but he was key to the reduction of these duties in 1834, though the Chartists would keep fighting on the issue and it wasn’t completely repealed until 1861.

Now, Bulwer-Lytton wasn’t super serious about a lot of this. He still saw his job as primarily a writer. In fact, he turned down a lordship of the Admiralty position from Lord Melbourne because he saw those duties of getting in the way of his pen. He did accept a baronship in 1838. In 1841, he left Parliament so he could travel around Europe. His politics moved to the right in these years. The key to this was the Corn Laws, the protectionist trade restrictions against importing grain that dominated post-Napoleonic Wars Britain. When Whig leader Lord Russell came out in opposition to them, Bulwer-Lytton was so outraged, he became a Tory and went back to Parliament as one and was there from 1852 to 1866, including a stint as Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1858 and when gold was discovered in British Columbia shortly after, Bulwer-Lytton pushed for the resources to send over British colonists to the colonial frontier. His idea was that it shouldn’t just be a military thing. They needed colonists to bring over British culture and really tie the region to the British, which probably explains Victoria today. I assume this was also a strategy against the the Americans doing what they had done in Oregon and flooding the region with settlers who would bring it into the United States. If so, that’s quite reasonable.

Bulwer-Lytton continued writing during his government years. That really increased again after he stepped away. He was always interested in the occult–another big thing for these 19th century romantic writers–and in 1871, he published Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, which is described on Wikipedia as ” a superior subterranean master race and the energy-form called “Vril.” Uh, OK. This stuff was all influential on the growing genre of science fiction, which I continue to have no patience for in most of its forms, largely because its story lines are usually so stupid. In any case, the Vril thing was synonymous at the time with “life-giving elixirs.” The book also made the theory that the center of the Earth is hollow and could have its own life forms a thing. The book was also influential on the Nazis, though I am not going to blame Bulwer-Lytton for that.

Now, no one really reads Bulwer-Lytton today, or at least I don’t think they do. Sci-fi fans I suppose might. In fact, his prose is so over the top to be satirized frequently. The man who came up with the line “It was a dark and stormy night” has an award named for him for the worst opening sentence of a novel. But really Bulwer-Lytton is really influential on the modern English language. Everyone knows that phrase, sure. But he also coined “the great unwashed” to describe the masses of poor and uneducated. He coined “pursuit of the almighty dollar.” He first wrote the words “the pen is mightier than the sword.” I had no idea of any of this. Also, is “It was a dark and stormy night” really that terrible of a first line for a novel? Sure, it’s a total cliche today, but was it in the 19th century? Seems a bit unfair to me.

Incidentally, it was Bulwer-Lytton who convinced Charles Dickens to rewrite the ending of Great Expectations so readers would have a happyish ending that brought Pip and Estella together. There were also a ton of Bulwer-Lytton adaptations into operas and plays in the late 19th century. I don’t know if anyone reads him today outside of those interested in the historical roots of sci-fi, but you can’t overstate how huge he was at the time.

Bulwer-Lytton died in 1873, at the age of 69, probably of some kind of brain infection after he had an operation that was supposedly going to cure his growing deafness. Not great.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton is buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England.

If you would like this series to visit American science fiction writers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. I’m sure all the readers of this blog will really want to fund me saying snarky things about their beloved orc characters and the like. Philip K. Dick (who while I don’t actually, I have read at least and I guess some of it is OK) is in Fort Morgan, Colorado and Sophie Wenzel Ellis is in Little Rock, Arkansas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.