Catherine Peters

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian of Letters

By

Hambledon and London 292pp £19.95 order from our bookshop

IN THE OPENING pages of Conrad’s The Nizer of the ‘Narcissus’, the old seaman Singleton is ‘spelling through Pelham with slow labour, and lost in an absorption profound enough to resemble a trance . . . The popularity of Bulwer Lytton in the forecastles of southtrn-going ships is a wonderful and bizarre phenomenon. What ideas do his polished and so curiously insincere sentences awaken in the simple minds of the big children who entanpeople those dark and wandering places of the earth?’

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • The mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity has long been agonised over. But what do we know about his victims?… ,
    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    Follow Us