SOURCE: “The Influence of Bulwer-Lytton in His Own Times,” in Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions, University of Georgia Press, 1976, pp. 222-34.

[In the following essay, Christensen discusses Bulwer's influence on such authors as Poe, Thackeray, and Dickens.]

Bulwer wanted his art to possess a timeless validity, and this study has generally emphasized those aspects of his work that imply his desire to appeal to the ages. Yet since he also achieved immense popularity within the context of his own age, his particular influence upon his contemporaries and immediate successors is also a matter of interest. To assess this influence fully would require one to consider the force not only of his fiction but also of his very carefully constructed plays—especially the enormously successful and frequently revived The Lady of Lyons (1838) and Money (1840). In summarizing the evidence of his influence, I shall nevertheless remain within the area of his fiction and fictional theory, which have constituted the subject of my study. His notions about the basic duality of art—the external form as opposed to the internal soul—may also help once again to organize my discussion. For his novels demonstrated their immediate power both in the more superficial aspect of their relevance to various fads and schools and in their more fundamental adherence to his theories of ideal art.

Pelham, which changed the fashion in men's evening clothes in 1828, was Bulwer's first spectacular success, and in subsequent works by the so-called silver-fork novelists one discerns the first instances of his literary influence. Novels by his friend Lord Mulgrave and by Mrs. Catherine Gore (with whom after an initial misunderstanding he would also be on cordial terms) thus seem to have perpetuated his literary legend about fashionable life. Although he would insist on the independent, realistic accuracy especially of Mrs. Gore's observations, his own achievement had helped—along with novels by Ward and Lister—to make the fashionable world possible for art. Pelham had enforced, for example, the conventional impression of a pattern and a center—Almack's—around which an otherwise futile society could seem to circle. Certain stereotypes of social climbers, dandies, and bored women, he had also shown, could make effectively interacting central characters, while a point of view that combined affection with satire could provide such works with some complexity of interest.¹

Yet despite the extreme copiousness of silver-fork production, only Bulwer's novel and Disraeli's Vivian Grey (the first part of which had appeared in 1826) may seem to possess any enduringly significant aesthetic value. More interestingly than in the succeeding silver-fork novels, the influence of the author of Pelham may consequently be sought in his diffusion of a most intriguing public legend about himself. For very much like Childe Harold before it, Pelham had conveyed the impression of an identity between protagonist and author, which the author had then taken pains for some years to validate. The Pelham image, as Bulwer so successfully adumbrated it, was that of an outrageously flippant and cynical dandy aristocrat, who nevertheless had a hidden social conscience and who was utterly dedicated to noble political and aesthetic ideals. While references to it are ubiquitous in the period, the image evidently fascinated Disraeli in particular. Frequently and quite consciously, Disraeli modelled his public deportment upon Pelham's and attributed his allegedly startling social successes to his having “Pelhamized” people. In the years from 1830 to 1837, during which he struggled so hard to get into Parliament, he also submitted to the guidance of Bulwer in person. As his constant mentor, Bulwer kindly introduced him to the right people (including the woman he would marry in 1839) and enabled him to gain the social credentials required for the launching of a political career. One can also find evidence of Bulwer's influence, of course, upon most of Disraeli's novels from The Young Duke (1831) and onwards.²

In the United States, where Bulwer's contemporary reputation was if anything even greater than in Britain, the author of Pelham had a notable effect upon Edgar Allan Poe. As “the most powerful influence on Poe's early prose writing,” Bulwer seems to stand, in the opinion of Michael Allen, behind Poe's frequent literary use of a persona and his general elaboration of “the fictional method of self-projection.” Poe naturally drew his inspiration in this regard not only from the self-propagandizing Pelham but more especially from Bulwer's shorter tales, such as “Monos and Daimonos” (1830), and from the discursive Asmodeus at Large series (1833). And outside his art too, Poe belongs very much to the histrionic Byronic and Bulwerian tradition of the dandy who “walk[s] the paths of life,” as Bulwer said, “in the garments of the stage.” Emphasizing his southern gentility, Poe created his aristocratic role, which the example of Bulwer further assured him could be admirably adapted to a career of public service—in particular, as a journalist. For Bulwer had also offered Poe most striking evidence of the fact that magazine writing (which Carlyle had once termed “below street-sweeping as a trade”) was now properly occupying “the first men in England.” Poe dreamed for many years of editing a journal that would possess the characteristics of the New Monthly Magazine under Bulwer's editorship (1831-33). As described in a prospectus of 1843, Poe's journal would be resolutely independent and impartial, would endeavor to please while elevating the public taste, and, most importantly of all, would bear throughout its pages the definite, individualizing imprint of a single mind. Although successfully realized, according to Allen, in only a few numbers of The Broadway Journal, Bulwer's ideals thus continued to haunt Poe, even when he conceived of his career—still in the histrionic manner—as a lurid failure.³ And when Poe died, it seemed appropriate to his literary executor to publish an obituary that compared him at length to a character in Bulwer's most recent novel, The Caxtons. That character, Francis Vivian, is the noble, promising dandy gone bad, and his association with Poe appeared to have sufficient justice to enable it to endure for some years in the public consciousness.⁴

Paul Clifford (1830) provided some of the first practical evidence of Bulwer's own commitment to noble political and social causes, and more definitely than Pelham it opened up a new field for the contemporary novel. While deriving from Godwin, its way of arguing on behalf of legal and penal reform appears to have made it the first important Tendenzroman in Britain. Bulwer followed it with Eugene Aram (1832), in which he advanced a thesis about criminal psychology and which remained throughout his lifetime one of his five or six most popular works. When other novelists hastened to imitate these works, though, they created not so much a school of novels with a thesis as a host of thrilling accounts of criminal life—the so-called Newgate novels. Among the most significant works to be referred thus to Bulwer's paternity are Ainsworth's best-selling Rookwood (1834) and Jack Sheppard (1839) as well as Dickens' Oliver Twist (and many portions of Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit).⁵ Later on, as Joseph I. Fradin has argued, the influence of Paul Clifford is also evident in Charles Reade's more genuinely tendentious novels—especially in “the prison scenes and reform program of It Is Never Too Late to Mend” (1856).⁶ Of incidental interest too is Reade's choice of the title “Masks and Faces” for a play he subsequently turned into a novel because Godwin had once proposed the same title to Bulwer for Paul Clifford.

Reade's It Is Never Too Late to Mend derives likewise from Bulwer's treatment of crime in Night and Morning (1841) and Lucretia (1846). Fradin finds these last two works even more important, however, as forerunners of the detective story. Once called—probably inaccurately—the “earliest detective story in the English language,” Night and Morning introduced in the character Favart the ancestor of the subsequently stereotyped “quietly menacing, ubiquitous” detective of English fiction. This novel, which has retained its peculiar power to enthrall some readers (and which contains, incidentally, an unexpectedly naughty scene in a French boarding house), surely impressed Wilkie Collins, who has more usually received credit for the invention of the English detective story. Sheridan Le Fanu was similarly influenced by Bulwer's way of plotting his stories of crime, and Fradin has noticed some startling parallels between the plots of Lucretia and Le Fanu's Uncle Silas (1864)⁷

Still one returns to the conclusion that most of the novels following in the wake of Bulwer's criminal tales use their horrific material and the carefully contrived element of suspense towards an end that differs considerably from Bulwer's own. Whereas Bulwer subordinates everything else to his overriding desire to convey a message or establish some “metaphysical” pattern, the works of his disciples exist primarily as sensational entertainments. This fact again becomes obvious, as Fradin once more forces the point home, in connection with the supernatural fad that Zanoni (1842) apparently inspired. To this fad one can attribute some rather brainless works by Ainsworth and Le Fanu—as well as aspects of Collins's more satisfactory Armadale (1866).⁸

Despite the extraordinary number of successors to Bulwer's early novels of fashion, crime, and the supernatural, their influence may be gauged almost more interestingly, then, with respect to the opposition they aroused. For the opposition was indeed widespread. While Bret Harte, for example, would later write a parody entitled “The Dweller of the Threshold” (1865), Bulwer's supposed responsibility for silver-fork and Newgate fiction provoked immediate and violent storms of rage. Bulwer received the greatest share of the blame for all those books that were allegedly lending glamor to high and low life and inspiring young men to become either dandies or criminals. The impression that Pelham merited denuciation as the very archetype of silver-fork fiction even became such a commonplace that Carlyle, who had almost surely not read the novel himself, naturally felt he could repeat it in Sartor Resartus.⁹ Although Pelham (very definitely) and its successors (rather less definitely) imply a satiric judgment of the society they treat, the satire often escaped notice, and the dandy novels were savagely parodied. At times, however, the parodies also betrayed a sneaking tendency to relish the snobberies of high life, and the dividing line between the celebrators and the satirists of the fashionable milieu is still a difficult one to draw. When the silver-fork genre had ceased properly to exist, its parodists continued their ambiguous and widely appreciated efforts: “the fashionable novels seem to have taken,” remarks Kathleen Tillotson, “a lot of killing.”¹⁰ The efforts of the celebrators and the satirists of fashionable life finally culminated in Vanity Fair—whose author had been parodying the silver-fork school in general and Bulwer in particular for many years.

Thackeray had been parodying, indeed, not only Bulwer's “fashionable” poses but also—in works like “Elizabeth Brownrigge” (1832), Catherine (1839-40), and “George de Barnwell” (1847)—Bulwer's Newgate fiction. And because of the degree of his obsessive animosity toward Bulwer, one must actually consider Thackeray as one of the principal Victorian novelists to have been affected by Bulwer. In Bulwer's novels, he confessed in 1848 to their mutual friend Lady Blessington, “there are big words which make me furious, and a pretentious fine writing against which I can’t help rebelling.” Yet as Ellen Moers points out, “Thackeray's early diary testifies to the closeness with which he followed Bulwer's exclusive rise to fame, and the care with which he read Falkland, The Disowned, Pelham, Devereux and so on.” In fact, he was constantly comparing himself jealously to Bulwer, and behind his revulsion lurked a guilty longing, not fully admitted until much later in life, to enjoy a youth like Pelham's. The complex fascination Bulwer's image of the dandy artist held for him must help to explain, then, his many contributions to the notoriously vicious campaign that Fraser's waged against Bulwer throughout the 1830's. It explains most importantly the Yellowplush Papers (1837), wherein Thackeray's protagonist is “an upside-down Pelham,” as well as Pendennis (1848-50), which constitutes Thackeray's “serious imitation of and commentary on the fashionable novel as Bulwer and Disraeli had made it.” In The Newcomes and Philip he would also employ projections of himself as commentators within the story and confess that he had learned the device from Bulwer.¹¹

Beyond the boundaries of the novel of society—high and low—and of particular social problems, Bulwer's influence operated in less controversial ways. Ernest Maltravers (1837) and Alice (1838) remained popular and quietly helped, for example, to make the usefulness of the Goethean pattern of Bildung clear to subsequent novelists. Although in earlier works Carlyle, Disraeli, and Bulwer himself had already employed elements of the plotting found in Wilhelm Meister, these two novels in particular brought the plot into an effective focus. The three-stage plot, which Bulwer would continue to use with many variations, involves the hero's rebellion and setting forth on his quest, his chastening experiences leading to his repentance, and finally his return home to discover that the object of his quest had been there all along. The pattern underlies innumerable Victorian novels, and one suspects that Bulwer, who was always recognized as an important channel for German influences, thus had some effect on many major works by Dickens, Meredith, Trollope, Eliot, and Hardy.¹²

More easily documented, perhaps, is his influence, as Coral Lansbury has defined it, upon the novels that contributed to a certain myth about Australia. Bulwer derived from Samuel Sidney's propaganda the impression that Australia, in particular, could constitute the blessed land in which experience chastened and redeemed the hero. Hard work enabled the prodigal there to earn back the squandered patrimony, and as a new and successful man he might even hope to return to England and to harmony with himself. In a larger sense Australia was the land in which the lost soul of England—the true patrimony of Englishmen—must be recovered and nourished back to health. Given enormous popular currency in The Caxtons (1848-49), the Australian myth clearly influenced Dickens—for example, in his sending of Micawber (who resembles not only John Dickens but also Uncle Jack in The Caxtons) off to Australia. Reade's It Is Never Too Late to Mend likewise derives in this respect, as well as in the others I have mentioned, from Bulwer, while Henry Kingsley's Australian novel, Geoffry Hamlyn (1859), also owes the structure of its plot to The Caxtons. Since many works of literature thereafter perpetuated it, the myth came profoundly to affect the Australian consciousness of identity. It was as an author, then, rather than as Colonial Secretary that Bulwer exerted his most important influence upon Australia.¹³

Bulwer's historical romances contributed to a related popular myth that informed the national consciousness back in Britain. As “the great disseminator of Scott's impulse in the early Victorian period,” Bulwer thus seems important to Avrom Fleishman at least in part because he transmitted Scott's ambiguous myth of “the Norman yoke” on to Charles Kingsley (especially in Hereward), Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence. Present in both The Last of the Barons (1843) and Harold (1848), the myth amounts to an awareness of the still-enduring, rural, Saxon soul of England, which centuries of rule by an alien Norman culture have never quite extirpated. Hardy, in particular, may seem to show the evidence of Bulwer's influence here and in his own brooding sense of the large historical forces that forever reduce individual man caught in time to impotence. For his historical consciousness resulted precisely from his boyhood absorption in the romances of Bulwer—along with those of Scott, Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James—and that absorption penetrated all aspects of his mature work.¹⁴

The historical works of Bulwer also have their more contemporary and timely relevance as comments upon political and social movements of the 1830's and 1840's, and some critics have found Bulwer influential in this respect too. Curtis Dahl believes Bulwer defined a new type of historical novel with present relevance, to which one can refer “Eliot's Romola, Shorthouse's John Inglesant, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, Morris's The Dream of John Ball, and … a large proportion of the historical poetry and drama of the age.” As James C. Simmons has furthermore indicated, Bulwer's works influenced not only historical novelists but also professional historians, whose citations of Bulwer strengthened a prevailing impression that he was as significant an historian as Hume or Palgrave.¹⁵

In another way too the historical works carried Bulwer's influence beyond the boundaries of fiction: from The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and on, they in particular inspired dramatic adaptations. Most of these adaptations are, to be sure, inconsequential, but Bulwer's Rienzi (1835) did become the source for Wagner's third opera. And Harold, for which Bulwer had done the research in the library of Tennyson d’Eyncourt, provided the chief source for Tennyson's play. (In the area of historical legend and poetry, it is also worth recalling that Tennyson believed Bulwer's epic King Arthur of 1848 had helped at least to prepare the public taste for his Idylls.)

Of the remaining fictional schools one might perhaps define a novel of domestic life for the sake of the Caxton series, which in addition to The Caxtons includes My Novel (1850-53) and What Will He Do with It? (1857-59). But while proving that these works carried Bulwer to the zenith of his popularity, Edwin M. Eigner has also argued that in them Bulwer seems to have been following rather than influentially leading the fashion.¹⁶ In the case, similarly, of Bulwer's contribution to the tradition of Utopian satire, evidence of his specific influence remains somewhat elusive. His The Coming Race (1871) apparently did have a decided influence on George Bernard Shaw, and it is clearly relevant, at least, to the entire flurry of such satires at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Yet The Coming Race did not, it seems, have any effect on Butler's Erewhon (1872). Early reviewers guessed that Erewhon must have been written by the author of The Coming Race, but Butler maintained he had not yet even read Bulwer's work and resented the ascription.¹⁷

Bulwer's most significant influence—to turn finally from what he considered “externals” to the “soul” of his aesthetic theory—ultimately transcended the framework of the individual schools and types of fiction. With all his prefaces, introductions, and assorted critical essays, he even became in many minds, both friendly and hostile, less the author of particular novels than the theorist and apologist for fictional “Art.” His propaganda on behalf of the “metaphysical” novel may thus have implied more than just an effort to establish one fictional genre at the expense of many others. For he was seeking to define the criteria that could make novels of all sorts works not merely of entertainment but rather of high aesthetic seriousness. And although many Victorians were beginning to converge from their various quarters toward this same goal, Bulwer may deserve a special share of the credit for ensuring the success of the tendency. “After Carlyle” and—to expand Mrs. Tillotson's observation—after Bulwer, “the rift between the ‘prophetic’ and the merely entertaining novel widens.”¹⁸

The specific influence of Bulwer in this tendency to treat fiction as serious art is probably detectable in much of the critical writing of the period. K. J. Fielding has noticed, for example, Bulwer's relevance to John Forster's theory of the novel, as embodied in his articles for the Examiner. Also readily documented is the widespread attention and respect accorded in particular to Bulwer's advocacy of “wholeness” or “unity” in fiction. Poe thus observed of Night and Morning that Bulwer had sacrificed everything to unity of plot, and Poe's own definition of a plot as “that in which no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole” again suggests the impact of Bulwer upon him. In worrying about how to achieve “unity” in Vanity Fair, Thackeray too affirmed the value of the aesthetic virtue that was linked, as Mrs. Tillotson implies, with Bulwer's name. The hostile critic W. C. Roscoe would likewise concede in 1859 the exemplary value in Bulwer's work of “the grasp of the whole design” and the way in which “he marshals all his material and concentrates his various forces on one result.” But while revealing Bulwer's influence beyond the field of fiction, Matthew Arnold may provide the most interesting testimony to the force of this aspect of Bulwer's fictional theory and practice: “If I have learnt to seek in any composition for a wide sweep of interest,” he wrote Bulwer in 1868, “and for a significance residing in the whole rather than in the parts, and not to give over-prominence, either in my own mind or in my work, to the elaboration of details, I have certainly had before me, in your works, an example of this mode of proceeding, and have always valued it in them.”¹⁹

Other readers valued Bulwer's works especially for their blend of “idealized patterns of meaning” with the “appearance of reality,” and it seems likely that Bulwer influenced Nathaniel Hawthorne very strongly in this area. Indeed, as John Stubbs analyzes it, Hawthorne's entire, well-developed theory of the romance appears to derive from Bulwer—although to some extent from Scott and Cooper too.²⁰ Professor Eigner's forthcoming book will tend, moreover, to show that Bulwer's theories underlie not only his own and Hawthorne's works but also those of Dickens, Emily Brontë, and Melville.

In some of these cases—and most clearly so in that of Emily Brontë—the affinity with Bulwer has probably not resulted from his specific influence. The relationship between Bulwer and Dickens, however, offers one of the most definite and important instances in literary history of two friends who profoundly and profitably influenced each other. Roughly like Goethe with respect to Schiller and Coleridge with respect to Wordsworth, Bulwer may generally have acted as the more intellectual and philosophical party in the relationship. In Bulwer's own opinion at least, Dickens was “no metaphysician” whereas he did understand “the practical part of authorship beyond my power.”²¹ So their strengths operated in happily complementary fashion not only during their collaboration to produce Bulwer's Not So Bad As We Seem (and their other efforts on behalf of their Guild) but in all aspects of their long literary association. Their value to each other emerges with especially interesting clarity in their correspondence of 1860-62 about Bulwer's A Strange Story, which Dickens was publishing in All the Year Round.

Limiting attention, though, to Bulwer's influence upon Dickens, one may recall that Bulwer persuaded his friend to change the ending of Great Expectations. And while critics formerly suspected that Bulwer must have urged basely commercial considerations, it now seems clear that he had appealed to the lofty theories which he and Dickens by then held in common. For Dickens had, in fact, subscribed for many years to Bulwer's important theories: “It is indisputable,” in the opinion of H. P. Sucksmith, “that many of the principles of narrative art in Bulwer's early essay [‘On Art in Fiction’] were put into practice by Dickens from 1838 and onwards with striking success.” Not only did Dickens thus repeat innumerable small motifs, details of plotting, and character types from Bulwer's novels, but he also began to use some of Bulwer's grandiose, Aristotelian vocabulary in his musings about the structure of his own novels. Sucksmith finds Dickens' application of Bulwer's notions about “reversal of fortune” and “multiple catastrophe” especially illuminating in this context. It is not surprising too, then, to observe Dickens meditating upon the technical importance of “sympathy” and of “idealised effects” which Bulwer had probably discussed with him before elaborating them in the Caxtoniana essays of 1862-63.²²

Even while elaborating his theories of a serenely ideal art, Bulwer had recognized the significance of the demonic element in life and art, and here one may observe a last important area of his influence. Melville and Poe surely responded to this aspect of his art,²³ but it may be that Dickens, once again, best intuited the terrible beauty in his vision of revolutionary wildness and evil. Jack Lindsay has thus linked A Tale of Two Cities most persuasively back to Zanoni and the unfinished Edwin Drood to A Strange Story, and Fradin has added force to the linkages. The same two critics have also gone on to identify Bulwer as one of the major links between the Romantic believers in the energy of the Imagination and the symbolist and surrealist adventurers into the realms of the irrational.²⁴

It is perhaps only necessary to add that whatever else may be debatable the supernatural elements in Bulwer's fiction did very definitely constitute a principal influence upon Mme. Blavatsky and her theosophists.²⁵ In the context, however, of Bulwer's extraordinarily pervasive influence upon the fiction, the myths, and the very conceptions of reality of his contemporaries, his contributions to theosophy may seem a distinctly minor affair.

Notes

1. [Matthew Whiting] Rosa, [The Silver Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding “Vanity Fair” (New York; Columbia University Press, 1936),] pp. 74-98, provides the most complete account of Bulwer's contribution to the silver-fork tradition.

2. [Ellen] Moers, [The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking Press, 1960),] pp. 94-100, usefully summarizes the evidence of Bulwer's influence upon Disraeli in this period.

3. Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 32-33, 47-48, 50, 57-58, 65-66, 68-70, 78-79, 101-2, 136, 187, 195. Allen's discussion of Bulwer's effect on Poe also constitutes a good analysis of Bulwer's editorship of the New Monthly Magazine—an important subject which is receiving more thorough attention from Linda Bonnell Jones in a study now in preparation. With respect to the influence of both Bulwer and Disraeli on Poe, see also Alexander Hammond, “Poe's ‘Lionizing’ and the Design of Tales of the Folio Club,” Esquire 18 (1972): 154-65.

4. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Cooper Square, 1969), pp. 646-47, 661, 676.

5. [Keith] Hollingsworth [The Newgate Novel, 1830-1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens, and Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963),] passim.

6. [Joseph I.] Fradin, “The Novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton,” [(Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1956),] p. 144.

7. Maurice Willson Disher, Blood and Thunder: Mid-Victorian Melodrama and Its Origins (London: Frederick Muller, 1949), p. 122. Fradin, “The Novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton,” pp. 145-46 and n. Regarding the special power of Night and Morning to affect certain readers, Macaulay assured Bulwer: “It moved my feelings more than anything you have written, and more than a man of forty-three, who has been much tossed about the world, is easily moved by works of the imagination.” And on the same page (2:331), the 2nd Earl of Lytton records his own reactions to the novel: “I remember the breathless interest which this book excited in me when I first read it as a boy, and the description of the discovery of the gang of coiners and the death of Ga[w]trey their leader, still remains one of the most vivid impressions which I received when first reading my grandfather's works.” [T. H. S.] Escott, [Edward Bulwer, First Baron Lytton of Knebworth: A Social, Personal, and Political Monograph (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1910),] p. 252, asserted in 1910 that “two generations of readers have seen in Night and Morning one among the most interesting of Bulwer's narrative melodramas.” See also [Richard Eugene] Lautz, [“Bulwer-Lytton as Novelist,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1967),] pp. 91-116.

8. Fradin, “The Novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton,” pp. 154-55 n.

9. Moers, p. 183, offers convincing arguments to show that Carlyle, who had no personal grudge against Bulwer, was most unlikely to have read Pelham or The Disowned himself.

10. [Kathleen] Tillotson, [Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961),] p. 86.

11. Gordon N. Ray, ed., The Letters and Private Papers of … Thackeray, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945-46), 2:485, and 3:298. Moers, pp. 198-213. See also [Michael] Sadleir's account of Thackeray's attacks on Bulwer, pp. 229-33, 256-58, and of the general campaign of Fraser's against Bulwer, pp. 226-29, 233-43 [(Bulwer: A Panorama: Edward and Rosina, 1803-1836 [Boston: Little Brown, 1931]).]

12. Susanne Howe's work remains the most complete study of the Goethean pattern in English fiction, but her analysis does not deal adequately with novels subsequent to Bulwer's. Far more to the point in defining the pattern and theory of Bildung—although it mentions Bulwer only in passing—is the article by G. B. Tennyson, “The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century English Literature,” University of Southern California Studies in Comparative Literature, 1 (1968): 135-46.

13. [Coral] Lansbury, [Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1970),] pp. 103, 111, 120, 158, and passim. Bulwer's preface to The Caxtons also implies the work's relationship to the Bildungsroman tradition: “the interior meaning … is … that, whatever our wanderings, our happiness will always be found within a narrow compass, and amidst the objects more immediately within our reach, but that we are seldom sensible of this truth … till our researches have spread over a wider area.”

14. [Avrom] Fleishman, [The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971),] pp. 26-27, 35-36, 180.

15. [Curtis] Dahl, [“History on the Hustings; Bulwer-Lytton's Historical Novels of Politics,” in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, edited by Robert C. Rathburn. and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958),] p. 62. [James C.] Simmons, [“Bulwer and Vesuvius: The Topicality of The Last Days of Pompeii,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24 (1969),] pp. 304-5.

16. Edwin M. Eigner, “Raphael in Oxford Street,” [in The Nineteenth-Century Writer and His Audience, edited by Harold Orel and George J. Worth (Lawrence: University of Kansas Humanistic Studies, no. 40, 1969),] pp. 61-73.

17. Geoffrey Wagner, [“A Forgotten Satire: Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming of Race,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 19 (1965),] pp. 379-85. B. G. Knepper, “Shaw's Debt to The Coming Race,” Journal of Modern Literature 1 (1971): 339-53.

18. Tillotson, p. 156.

19. [Harvey Peter] Sucksmith, [The Narrative Art of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970),] p. 118 n., reports that Professor K. J. Fielding has told him about these discoveries with respect to the nature of Bulwer's influence upon John Forster. Quinn (see n. 4 above), pp. 314-15. Tillotson, p. 240. W. C. Roscoe, “Sir E. B. Lytton, Novelist, Philosopher, and Poet,” National Review 7 (1859): 308. 2nd Earl of Lytton, 2:445.

20. John Caldwell Stubbs, The Pursuit of Form: A Study of Hawthorne and the Romance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), pp. 9-11, 20, 30-31.

21. Bulwer's two paragraphs of interesting and balanced assessment of Dickens, written on the flyleaf of a book, were printed in the brochure of the Dickens Centenary Exhibition (1970) at Knebworth House.

22. Eigner and Fradin, “Bulwer-Lytton and Dickens' Jo,” [Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24 (1969),] pp. 98-102. Eigner, “Bulwer-Lytton and the Changed Ending of Great Expectations,” [Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 (1970),] pp. 104-8. Sucksmith, pp. 110-19, 152, 232, 252. See also Sibylla Jane Flower, “Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton,” Dickensian 69 (1973): 78-79.

23. With reference to Bulwer's influence on Melville, see Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. 171. Professor Howard has told me of his increasing conviction that Melville responded to many aspects of Bulwer's art, possibly because a Pittsfield neighbor used to give him copies of Bulwer's books. Henry A. Murray considers Bulwer one of the possible “architects of Melville's early ideal self” (see Murray's Introduction to Melville's Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities [New York: Farrar Straus, 1949], pp. xli, lxvi).

24. [Jack] Lindsay, [Charles Dickens: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Andrew Dakers, 1950)] pp. 196-98 (which also relate “the dynamic element” in Night and Morning to The Old Curiosity Shop), 364-69 (re: Zanoni and A Tale of Two Cities), and 406-9 (re: A Strange Story and Edwin Drood, to which works Wilkie Collins' Moonstone should presumably also be compared). See also Lindsay's Appendix on Bulwer, which virtually reprints his article, “Clairvoyance of the Normal,” Nineteenth Century 145 (1949): 26-38. Fradin, “The Novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton,” pp. 165-66, 170-73. Fradin, “‘The Absorbing Tyranny of Every-day Life,’” [Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16 (1961),] pp. 15-16.

25. [S. B.] Liljegren, [Bulwer-Lytton's Novels and Isis Unveiled (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1957)] passim.