The man behind 'It was a dark and stormy night' also named a Canadian town
Edward Bulwer-Lytton gave English some of its stickiest phrases, from the pen being mightier than the sword to the great unwashed. He also opened a novel with a dark and stormy night, inspiring a contest for the worst opening sentence imaginable, and as colonial secretary he helped found British Columbia.
Born on 25 May 1803, the youngest son of a general, he lost his father at four. A tutor encouraged him to publish a book of poems at 15, and in 1825, as a Cambridge student, his verse earned the university's Chancellor's Gold Medal. Two years later he married the Irish beauty Rosina Doyle Wheeler against his mother's wishes; she cut off his allowance, so he wrote to pay the bills. His 1828 novel Pelham, a sharp portrait of dandy society, made his name as a wit.
The marriage turned into one of the ugliest of the age. The couple separated in 1833, and Rosina satirised him in print. When she denounced him at an election meeting in 1858, he stopped her allowance, kept her from their children and had her committed to an asylum, from which she was freed after a public outcry. She later told the story in A Blighted Life.
Politics ran alongside the writing. First elected in 1831 as a Whig follower of Jeremy Bentham, he backed the Reform Bill, later returned as a Conservative for Hertfordshire, and served as Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1858 and 1859. When the Fraser Canyon gold rush broke out, he chose Richard Clement Moody to lead a corps of Royal Engineers and establish British Columbia, and a trading post there was renamed Lytton in his honour. He also notified the first governor of what became Queensland. In 1866 he was made Baron Lytton.
His output was vast and restless, spanning historical fiction, mystery, the occult and early science fiction. Esoteric groups claimed him as a patron because of books such as Zanoni, though he told one Rosicrucian society he had never agreed to the title. He tried the fashionable water cure at Malvern, and Fulham Football Club says he once lived in the original Craven Cottage. He died in Torquay on 18 January 1873 after an ear operation went wrong, and was buried in Westminster Abbey against his wishes. The mock contest named after him ran from 1982 to 2024.
Source: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
