Books with author Edward Lord Lytton Bulwer

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“Bulwer-Lytton was a prolific writer….His novels were very famous in his lifetime, and their range is an indication of the literary variety and changes in the Victorian period. He was a friend of the philosopher William Godwin whose influence can be traced in his early novels such as Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832). He was also influenced by the fashionable society and it is reflected in his first successful work Pelham, which has a similarity to Benjamin Disraeli’s political novels of high society….The literary output produced during the mid of his career such as The Caxtons – A Family Picture was written under the influence of the strict Victorian moral code. He showed the influence of Sir Walter Scott on the Victorian in his historical novel such as The Last Days of Pompeii, Rienzi, and The Last of the Barons while The Pilgrims of the Rhine shows the German influence.” -The Atlantic Companion to Literature in English "The first nineteenth-century novelist to project himself as an intellectual, interested in ideas, and how fiction can be their vehicle." -John Sutherland. “We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.” - Edward Bulwer-Lytton

From PELHAM to the PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE, from RIENZI to the LAST DAYS OF POMPEII, -- PAUL CLIFFORD is the only one in which a robber has been made the hero, or the peculiar phases of life which he illustrates have been brought into any prominent description. Without pausing to inquire what realm of manners or what order of crime and sorrow is open to art, and capable of administering to the proper ends of fiction, I may be permitted to observe that the present subject was selected, and the Novel written, with a twofold object: First, to draw attention to two errors in our penal institutions; namely, a vicious prison-discipline, and a sanguinary criminal code, -- the habit of corrupting the boy by the very punishment that ought to redeem him, and then hanging the man at the first occasion, as the easiest way of getting rid of our own blunders. Between the example of crime which the tyro learns from the felons in the prison-yard, and the horrible levity with which the mob gather round the drop at Newgate, there is a connection which a writer may be pardoned for quitting loftier regions of imagination to trace and to detect. So far this book is less a picture of the king's highway than the law's royal road to the gallows, -- a satire on the short cut established between the House of Correction and the Condemned Cell. A second and a lighter object in the novel of PAUL CLIFFORD (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque or travesty in the earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing essentially different between vulgar vice and fashionable vice, and that the slang of the one circle is but an easy paraphrase of the cant of the other.