The Caxtons

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, PC (25 May 1803 - 18 January 1873) was an English writer and politician. He served as a Whig MP from 1831 to 1841 and a Conservative MP from 1851 to 1866. He was Secretary of State for the Colonies from June 1858 to June 1859, when he selected Richard Clement Moody to be founder of British Columbia. He was offered the Crown of Greece in 1862 after the abdication of King Otto, but declined it. He became Baron Lytton of Knebworth in 1866. His son was the statesman Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, who served as Governor-General of India and British Ambassador to France, and wrote poetry under the pseudonym Owen Meredith. Bulwer-Lytton's literary works were highly popular; his novels earned him a fortune. He coined the phrases "the great unwashed," "pursuit of the almighty dollar," "the pen is mightier than the sword," and "dweller on the threshold." Then came a sharp decline in his reputation, so that he is known today for little more than the opening line "It was a dark and stormy night," the first seven words of his novel Paul Clifford (1830). The sardonic Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest attempts to find the "opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels."LifeBulwer-Lytton was born on 25 May 1803 to General William Earle Bulwer of Heydon Hall and Wood Dalling, Norfolk and Elizabeth Barbara Lytton, daughter of Richard Warburton Lytton of Knebworth House, Hertfordshire. He had two older brothers, William Earle Lytton Bulwer (1799-1877) and Henry (1801-1872), later Lord Dalling and Bulwer. When Edward was four, his father died and his mother moved to London. He was a delicate, neurotic child and was discontented at a number of boarding schools. But he was precocious and 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, where he met John Auldjo, but shortly afterwards moved to Trinity Hall. In 1825 he won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for English verse. In the following year he took his BA degree and printed, for private circulation, a small volume of poems, Weeds and Wild Flowers. He purchased a commission in the army in 1826, but sold it in 1829 without serving. In August 1827, he married Rosina Doyle Wheeler (1802-1882), a famous Irish beauty, but against his mother's wishes, who withdrew his allowance, so that he was forced to work for a living. They had two children, Lady Emily Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton (1828-1848), and (Edward) Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831-1891) who became Governor-General and Viceroy of British India (1876-1880). His writing and political work strained their marriage, while his infidelity embittered Rosina;[10] in 1833 they separated acrimoniously and in 1836 the separation became legal. Three years later, Rosina published Cheveley, or the Man of Honour (1839), a near-libellous fiction bitterly satirising her husband's alleged hypocrisy.[10] In June 1858, when her husband was standing as parliamentary candidate for Hertfordshire, she indignantly denounced him at the hustings. He retaliated by threatening her publishers, withholding her allowance, and denying her access to the children. Finally he had her committed to a mental asylum, but after a public outcry, she was released a few weeks later. This incident was chronicled in her memoir, A Blighted Life (1880). She continued her attacks upon her husband's character for several years. The death of Bulwer-Lytton's mother in 1843 greatly saddened him. His own "exhaustion of toil and study had been completed by great anxiety and grief," and by "about the January of 1844, I was thoroughly shattered." In his mother's room at Knebworth House, Bulwer-Lytton "had inscribed above the mantelpiece a request that future generations preserve the room as his beloved mother had used it." It remains essentially unchanged to this day...