Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, was an English writer and politician whose life ran through much of the nineteenth century, from 25 May 1803 to 18 January 1873. He was born to General William Earle Bulwer of Norfolk and Elizabeth Barbara Lytton of Knebworth House, Hertfordshire. His father died when he was four, and his mother moved to London. Books, verse, politics, family rank, and private strain all became part of the world he worked in.

Bulwer-Lytton showed literary ambition early. At 15, encouraged by a tutor named Wallington, he published Ishmael and Other Poems, later described as an immature work. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1822, moved to Trinity Hall, and in 1825 won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for English verse. The next year he took his BA and privately printed Weeds and Wild Flowers. Around this period he fell in love with a woman whose father arranged her marriage to someone else. She died about the time he went to Cambridge, and Bulwer-Lytton later said the loss affected all his subsequent life.

His books were widely known in his own time, and some of his phrases travelled farther than many titles. He coined “pursuit of the almighty dollar,” “the pen is mightier than the sword,” “dweller on the threshold,” “the great unwashed,” and the opening phrase “It was a dark and stormy night.” His 1842 book Zanoni included Rosicrucian and other esoteric notions, though he later objected when an English Rosicrucian society called him its “Grand Patron” without his sanction. The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, held from 1982 to 2024, drew sardonic attention to that famous stormy opening.

Politics ran beside his writing for decades. Bulwer began as a follower of Jeremy Bentham. He served as a Whig member of Parliament from 1831 to 1841, representing St Ives and then Lincoln, and spoke in favour of the Reform Bill. He worked on the issue of newspaper stamp duties and, after the Whig Party’s dismissal from office in 1834, issued A Letter to a Late Cabinet Minister on the Crisis. He was created a baronet in 1838. Later he served as a Conservative from 1851 to 1866. From June 1858 to June 1859 he was Secretary of State for the Colonies, and in that office selected Richard Clement Moody to found British Columbia. In 1866 he was created Baron Lytton of Knebworth.

His private life was often troubled. In 1827 he married Rosina Doyle Wheeler against his mother’s wishes, losing his allowance and having to work for a living. The marriage produced two children, Emily Elizabeth and Edward Robert, who later became Governor-General and Viceroy of British India. Writing, political work, and infidelity strained the marriage; the couple separated in 1833, legally in 1836, and Rosina continued to attack his character in print and in public. The death of his mother in 1843 also shook him deeply. In 1844, following her will, he changed his surname from Bulwer to Bulwer-Lytton and assumed the Lytton arms by royal licence.

In later years Bulwer-Lytton struggled with his health, including a long disease of the ear. He lived in Torquay for the last two or three years of his life, nursing his condition, and died after an operation to cure deafness led to an abscess and severe pain. Against his wishes, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. His unfinished historical romance Pausanias the Spartan was edited and published by his son in 1876. For a quotes website, his appeal rests not only in fame but in verbal force: he had a gift for compact, memorable sayings. One of them still sounds like practical counsel: “To find what you seek in the road of life, the best proverb of all is that which says, ‘Leave no stone unturned.’”