Talk:Edward Bulwer-Lytton

message: What about adding the 1911 encyclopedia article? --Keichwa 17:30 Apr 26, 2003 (UTC)
:done --Keichwa 20:41, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was also a terrific artist.  For example, his painting THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII is quite famous.
Bulwer-Lytton as a painter isn't known to me.  Where can I see this picture?
--Keichwa 19:41, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: 2003

message: Richard Wagner's work Rienzi is based a Bulwar Lytton work, anyopne know the title?
:It is based on B-L's novel of the same title, Rienzi.  Antandrus  (talk)  20:31, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: 2005

message: On what basis do we call him this?  I've not read more than a few pages of Bulwer-Lytton, but comparing what I've read to other Victorian writers - even to one so mediocre as Wilkie Collins, leaves Bulwer-Lytton rather short.  Do critics actually consider him a good stylist? john k 18:35, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A fine Victorian stylist? 

message: Hi, I was redirected to this page when looking for "The Great Unwashed" -
it is quite interesting, but it does not answer my original question!
(Being: What the heck does "The Great Unwashed" *mean*?)“
Those who aren't of the elite, as spoken of by the elite. The hoi polloi, the lumpenproletariat, the lowest common denominator; Tom, Dick, and Harry; the man in the street/man on the Clapham omnibus, etc. Scutigera (talk) 05:51, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Great Unwashed 

message: I said it once and Ill say it again-this sentence has nothing so "bad! about it.A simple example-if there is a night where clouds obstruct the moon,then it is a DARK knight and when those clouds are rain clouds and it rains,its a STORMY night.A dark night does NOT necesarily HAVE to  be STORMY.If it would go "stormy and dark" THEN it would have been "bad" ,however I have often seen nights witch are DARK and are NOT stormy.Therefore I believe this (plus the contest of bad literature,given Edward Bulwer-Lytton's name) an unfair disgrace of the writer.
New Babylon 2 12:31, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Have you read the rest of the opening sentence? 'Dark and stormy night' is just a dull, undescriptive cliché, but the rest of the sentence is truly terrible, and entirely deserves its infamy. Terraxos (talk) 21:00, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Why or how is it dull?  It reflects the Romantic interest in the sublime.  As the previous writer noted, it is imformative.  Is it a cliche?  Now, yes.  But had it ever been used before B-L?  If so, why is he given (dis)credit?  If not, then it WAS hardly a cliche.  Shall we like-wise call WS the most cliche-ridden writer since the Bible?
Kdammers (talk) 01:58, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

text: The sentence in full really isn't bad at all.  I can easily picture a dark street, the rain showers, the blasts of wind.  Modern literature tries to hook the reader with a catchy opening in the first few sentences, but Victorian literature often begins with evocative description.  Compare the opening to Bleak House:  "London.  Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.  Implacable November weather.  As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.  Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.  Dogs, undistinguishable in mire.  Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers..."  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Afalbrig (talk • contribs) 09:03, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It may be a cliché now but it wasn't a cliché when he wrote it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.31.130.120 (talk) 15:12, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  It was a dark and stormy night

message: how is it possible that the book zanoni is influenced by Bulwer Lyttons membership of the english Rosicrucian Society which was founded in 1867, while the book was published in 1842?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.157.231.69 (talk) 20:23, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  strange 

message: A quick Google Books search reveals the phrase "the great unwashed" in the 1835 book The Unfortunate Man by Frederic Chamier (New York: Harper & Bros., p. 164):
Here is a Google Books link.
This would appear to predate The Parisians by BW by a good half-century or more.  Grover cleveland (talk) 00:28, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The phrase originates before the widespread introduction of indoor plumbing. At the time only the rich had bathrooms and washing facilities. Everyone else had to have a wash or bath in a tin bath in front of the fire, or wash using a tin bucket filled from a well - if they washed at all. Hence the phrase. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.31.130.120 (talk) 15:19, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Great Unwashed" 

message: Like many others, I have long known of the phrase "the great unwashed", which has entered the lexicon and is typically used unattributed, with most people probably unaware of its origin or context, unless they seek out the source, or learn it along the way.
I am one of the latter. I didn't set out to learn the source. I learned along the way, courtesy of Wikipedia and the contributions of editors such as above. And given the time-period, I can also see the context, again courtesy of Wikipedia, and the reading around I have been doing in my own contributions. Sanitation and hygiene were particularly salient issues of that era, to the extent that it impacted mortality in the population at large, and in hospitals. And then along come the overlapping hydropathy and sanitation movements of the 1840s onwards, followed by a series of parliamentary acts to facilitate the construction of baths and washhouses for the general public. So "the great unwashed" is not just a quote, the origins of which are oft forgotten or unawares, it is a quote with context.Wotnow (talk) 01:59, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The phrase originates before the widespread introduction of indoor plumbing. At the time only the rich had bathrooms and washing facilities. Everyone else had to have a wash or bath in a tin bath in front of the fire, or wash using a tin bucket filled from a well - if they washed at all. Hence the phrase. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.31.130.120 (talk) 15:19, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: "The Great Unwashed": Historical and socio-political context

message: 'Unquestionably, its story of a subterranean race of men waiting to reclaim the surface is one of the first science fiction novels." - I guess it depends on what one understands by "one of" ( one of three, one of thirty, one of three hundred?), but - especially with the first word fo the sentence - I can't see how this can be claimed.   Consider  Tyssot de Patot's hollow-earth novel La Vie,  Shelley's two novels, Loudon's Mummy, and Verne's earlier novels for starters. Kdammers (talk) 11:47, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not one of the first SF novels 

message: Why does this page clearly serve for the sole purpose of bashing on Lytton?I mean,aside from claims that his "name is a byword for bad writing",to which the sole reference is the existence of the contest,which is also shown not in an exactely neutral point of view-but I must also complain about the links-the "Dickens of Lytton" page outright calls Lytton "the worst author in the history of leters" ,once again basing its asumptions solely on the EXISTENCE of the contest.
81.91.217.80 (talk) 09:00, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bias in favour of the Almighty Contest

message: There's very little about the circumstances surrounding his death: if some good soul might contribute a little of the wheres and whens and whys, it would be good. 
Otterswimshome (talk) 05:07, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Otterswimshome you may be interested in the last couple of para's that are now in the EBL 'Life' section. CPES (talk) 19:44, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Circumstances of Death 

message: The Wikipedia rules clearly state that the talk page is not a forum for general discussion.  What you think of him, his books or his style is not what talk pages are for.  They are stricly to discuss what should or should not be inserted in the article.  If you can find critiques of his work by famous writers (either positive or negative), you may place that in the article if you wish, but having chat sessions about who likes him and who doesn't is AGAINST THE RULES. Mike Hayes (talk) 01:32, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Not a forum

message: Here is the email reply granting permission to place all or part of the above quote in the Wikipedia Bulwer-Lytton article:
Thank you for your email,
We can now grant you permission and we would have no objection to this provided that a credit for Radio Times is put on “by kind permission of Radio Times” which will indicate no payment has taken place.
kind regards
DAVID HODGES
Radio Times Reader Service (radio.times@bbc.co.uk)
CPES (talk) 11:47, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The quotation has the man's name in brackets with a wrong spelling.  Can't this be corrected with-out creating a problem? Kdammers (talk) 12:42, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks Kdammers it is done- no probs. CPES (talk) 18:05, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Radio Times quote (''Claire Webb'')

message: I guess he just had a hard time coming up with fresh titles, eh? Varlaam (talk) 21:39, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Falkland (1827) and Falkland (1834) 

message: ...was a phrase also used by an English playwright, who wrote a few plays in the late 1500's and early 1600's.  Actually they're quite good, and some people still read them today.  You might have heard of him.  It's very possible that Edward Bulwer-Lytton had read him, too. 76.118.23.40 (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 16:52, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: @76.118.23.40 can you cite an actual play, act, and scene? I've never seen this attribution. Abuldiz (talk) 22:48, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bad News:  "The Pen Is Mighter Than The Sword," which he coined... 

message: I'm wondering how to reference something that I know personally to be true, but for which I don't have a written source. A friend of mine showed me a first edition he had bought of the book in which Bulwer-Lytton's play Richelieu first appeared in print. The way the famous quote appears is quite illuminating. "The pen is" appears at the end of a line, and the space between 'pen' and 'is' very noticeably narrower than all the other spaces on the page (presumably the typesetter used an n-space instead of an m-space). The implication is that B-L was suggesting "the penis--mightier than the sword" as well as its explicit meaning. I saw this with my own eyes, and know that it is a fact, but I don't want to include it in the article without some kind of independent citation. Am I right in thinking this is the proper Wikipedia procedure? Anlala (talk) 17:09, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  The pen is 

message: Can anybody identify precisely where it is (page, chapter etc.)? I'm reading the original text and have searched multiple different sources and web based texts and it truly does not seem to be in this novel. --66.220.240.234 (talk) 04:19, 17 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: That's exactly what I was going to write here. Could anybody answer? There's no 'lived cleanly' in the various online texts either, probably the citation comes from another book. Glatisant (talk) 13:49, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  I can't find "the great unwashed" text in Paul Clifford.  

message: The last sentence I changed as it seemed fairly subjective regarding the "superior" earlier draft - I have tried to change it to reflect a more npov  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.60.202.230 (talk) 05:41, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Literary works 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: "However by 1859, Henrietta was having a love affair with Edward Bulwer Lytton..." Snori (talk) 01:12, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Henrietta Vansittart

message: it says edwards was a conservative from `1851` to `1866' yet he died in `1859'...  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.19.96.197 (talk) 20:32, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  error? 

message: I check pages listed in :Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of :Edward Bulwer-Lytton's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.
Reference named "dnb":
From Arthur Cecil: Knight, Joseph, rev. Nilanjana Banerji.  "Cecil, Arthur (1843–1896)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 7 October 2008, 
From William Creswick: 
From Earl of Lytton: 
From Charles Umpherston Aitchison: 
From Ellen Terry: Booth, Michael R. "Terry, Dame Ellen Alice (1847–1928)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edn, January 2008, accessed 4 January 2010
From Henry Lytton: Parker, J., rev. K. D. Reynolds.  "Lytton, Sir Henry Alfred (1865–1936)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 5 October 2008, 
From Catherine Hutton: 
From Peter Cunningham (British writer): 
From Edward Askew Sothern: Holder, Heidi J. "Sothern, Edward Askew (1826–1881)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 7 November 2008.
From Benjamin Disraeli: Parry, Jonathan. 'Disraeli, Benjamin, earl of Beaconsfield (1804–1881)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, May 2011, accessed 23 August 2013 
I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 13:33, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Fixed, DuncanHill (talk) 13:46, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orphaned references in [[:Edward Bulwer-Lytton]] 

message: According to the ODNB "His daunting array of names is a source of frequent confusion. His forenames were Edward George Earle Lytton (the last of them being his mother's maiden name). For the first forty years of his life his surname was Bulwer though out of respect for his mother's family, to whose estates he was heir, he often styled himself Edward Lytton Bulwer. When his mother died in 1843 and he came into his inheritance, he changed his surname by royal licence to Bulwer Lytton (without a hyphen, though others sometimes supplied one), thus becoming Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer Lytton. He was created Baron Lytton of Knebworth in 1866. For consistency, and concision, he is referred to below simply as Bulwer, the name by which he was longest known". So, should the article be at Edward Bulwer Lytton or at Edward Bulwer? It certainly shouldn't be where it is now, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. DuncanHill (talk) 13:52, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I've seen his surname hyphenated so often that I always assumed that was the correct form.  But I'm always happy to be surprised.  I support Edward Bulwer Lytton. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JackofOz (talk • contribs) 20:09, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Name 

message: At risk of too much trivia, I could add that Palo Alto's Lytton Avenue in the shadow of Stanford University is named for Bulwer. Several streets here are named for writers and statesmen, from Addison to Webster. Oddly I do not see a Place names section in any of those other eponym's Wikipedia pages. 
How do we determine on whose pages such a section is relevant? 
Rairden (talk) 08:40, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Place names 

message: Here to discuss a point per being reverted twice by . As seen here, for birth and death place we are supposed to list "city, administrative region, sovereign state." The sovereign state that Edward Bulwer-Lytton was born and died in was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Therefore this is relevant as it is explicitly stated that this should be included. While the editor's point regarding "England was also part of the solar system in B-Lytton's time, but that's not relevant here either", is, I assume, likely sarcasm, the solar system obviously isn't a sovereign state, nor do we list such things under birth place or death place. We do however note the sovereign state the person was born and died in, per what is specifically stated in the template. It is also reasonable to note this because the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is not the same state that exists today (the United Kingdom). Helper201 (talk) 14:59, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Tagging recent editors to the discussion -  and . Helper201 (talk) 07:08, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

text: Actually, it says, "For modern subjects, the country should generally be a sovereign state; for United Kingdom locations, the constituent countries of the UK are sometimes used instead, when more appropriate in the context." He was English, born in England; the UKoGBaI stuff is unnecessary.--Orange Mike | Talk 18:50, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Place of birth and place of death