Lytton, EDWARD BULWER, LORD, novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and politician, was born at 31 Baker Street, London, on 25th May 1803. He was the third and youngest son of General Earle Bulwer (1776–1807) of Heydon and Dalling in Norfolk, by Elizabeth Barbara Lytton (1773–1843), the heiress of Knebworth in Hertfordshire. As a child a devourer of books, his favourites Amadis de Gaul and the Fairy Queen, he took early to rhyming, and went to school at nine, though not, it may be unluckily, to a public one, but to six private tutors in succession (1812–21). In 1820 he published Ismael and other Poems, and about the same time was 'changed for life' by a hopeless, tragic first love. At Trinity Hall, Cambridge (1822–25), he read English history, political economy, metaphysics, and early English literature; spoke much at the Union; carried off the Chancellor's gold medal for a poem upon 'Sculpture,' but took only a pass degree. Meanwhile, in a long-vacation walking-tour (1824), he had visited the grave of his lost love in the Lake Country; and there, in Scotland, and in the north of England, had strange adventures with cut-throats and most impossible Gypsies. Now, his college life ended, he alternated awhile between Paris and London; and in London, in December 1825, he met Rosina Wheeler (1802–82), a beautiful Irish girl, whom in August 1827, despite his mother, he married. It was a most unhappy marriage. She bore him a daughter, Emily (1828–48), and a son, the future Earl of Lytton; in 1836 they separated. But his marriage did this for him: it called forth a marvellous literary activity, for the temporary estrangement from his mother threw him almost wholly on his own resources. He had only £200 a year, and he lived at the rate of £3000; the deficiency was supplied 'out of his well-stored portfolio, his teeming brain, and his indefatigable industry.' During the next ten years he produced twelve novels, two poems, one political pamphlet, one play, the whole of England and the English, three volumes of Athens, its Rise and Fall, of which only two ever were published, and all the essays and tales collected in the Student, to which must be added his untold contributions to the Edinburgh, the Westminster, the New Monthly (of which he became editor in 1831), the Examiner, &c. His Wertherian Falkland, published anonymously in 1827, gave little promise of the brilliant success, both at home and abroad, of Pelham (1828), the clever persiflage of whose dandy hero is still delightful. No two readers agree on the relative merit of his books, but indeed this very divergence of opinion as to which is really his masterpiece only illustrates his amazing versatility. Certainly Pelham is better than Paul Clifford (1830), a marvellous idealisation of the highwayman, as Eugene Aram (1832) is of the murderer; but most will rank it as inferior to the exquisitely fanciful Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834) or to one or another of his four splendid historical novels—The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Rienzi (1835), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold (1843). Then, there is his domestic trilogy, The Caxtons (1850), My Novel (1853), and What will he do with it? (1859), Sterne-like, yet strangely un-Sterne-like, surpassing Thackeray for peasants and Dickens for gentlemen, and both in knowledge of the world of politics. Or there are Zanoni (1842), A Strange Story (1862), and, shorter but stronger than either, The Haunted and the Harpists (Blackwood's Magazine, 1859). No English story of the supernatural comes near to this, and why?—because he wrote here as a believer, as a serious student of astrology, chiromancy, occult lore generally. These books are triumphs in the art of fiction in its most widely differing divisions, and taken together, display an unexampled range of powers. Here the reader finds at once vast knowledge, rich suggestiveness wedded to profundity of thought, fresh insight into perplexing psychological and social problems, breadth of view, wit in richer measure than humour, together with an unusual power of handling vivid incident and a rare mastery of plot-construction.
Of his plays it must suffice to say that the Lady of Lyons (1838), Richelieu (1838), and Money (1840), all three of which owed something to hints from Macready, still hold the stage as firmly as the masterpieces of Goldsmith and Sheridan; of his poems that King Arthur (1848), and even St Stephens (1860) and the Lost Tales of Milctus (1866), will all be forgotten when the New Timon (1846) is still kept in remembrance by the savage answer it provoked from Tennyson.
In 1831, at the age of twenty-eight, he had entered parliament as member for St Ives, and attached himself to the Reform party; but Lincoln next year returned him as a Protectionist Liberal, and that seat he held till 1841. In 1838 the Melbourne administration conferred on him a baronetcy for his brilliant services as a pamphleteer; in Dec. 1843 he succeeded, by his mother's death, to the Knebworth estate, and assumed the additional surname of Lytton. He now sought to re-enter parliament, in 1847 contesting Lincoln unsuccessfully; and in 1852 he was returned as Conservative member for Hertfordshire. Deafness hindered him from shining as a debater, but he made himself a successful orator. In the Derby government (1858-59) he was Colonial Secretary, and signalised his brief tenure of office by calling into existence the two vast colonies of British Columbia and Queensland. In 1866 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Lytton. He died at Torquay on 18th January 1873, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Lord Lytton's works in all exceed sixty, and fill more than 110 volumes. To those already mentioned may be added The Disowned (1829), Devereux (1829), Godolphin (1833), Ernest Maltravers (1837), Alice (1837), Leila and Calderon (1838), Night and Morning (1841), Poems and Ballads, chiefly from Schiller (1844), Lucretia (1846), Caxtoniana (1863), The Coming Race (anonymously, 1870), Kenelm Chillingly (1873), The Parisians (1874), and Pausanias the Spartan (unfinished, 1876). The Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of Lord Lytton (vols. i.-ii. 1883), by his son, comes down only to 1832, so must be supplemented by the political Memoir, also by the Earl of Lytton, prefixed to the Speeches of Lord Lytton (2 vols. 1874).