Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 21/12/2018

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10393 / CC BY SA 3.0

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, PC (25 May 1803 – 18 January 1873) was an English novelist, poet, playwright 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, during which time he selected Richard Clement Moody to be the founder of British Columbia. Bulwer-Lytton was offered the Crown of Greece in 1862, after the abdication of King Otto, but declined it. He became Baron Lytton of Knebworth in the British peerage in 1862.

Bulwer-Lytton was the father of the statesman Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, who served as Governor-General of India and as British Ambassador to France, and composed poetry under the pseudonym Owen Meredith.

Bulwer-Lytton's literary works were highly popular and his bestselling novels earned him a large fortune. He invented 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 literary reputation, so that he is known for little more than the much-parodied 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".

Bulwer-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; 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. 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...