爱德华·布尔沃-利顿

爱德华·布尔沃-利顿（英语：Edward Bulwer-Lytton，1803年5月25日—1873年1月18日）英国作家，保守党政治人物。其代表作为小说庞贝城末日，出版于1834年。政治方面，布尔沃-利顿于1858年成为首相德比伯爵政府的一员，担任殖民地事务大臣至1859年。1866年获册封为利顿男爵（Baron Lytton）。英语俗语“The pen is mightier than the sword”（笔诛胜于剑伐）即来自于其剧作黎塞留（Richelieu）。

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (25 May 1803 – 18 January 1873) was an English writer and politician. He served as a Whig member of Parliament from 1831 to 1841 and a Conservative from 1851 to 1866. He was Secretary of State for the Colonies from June 1858 to June 1859, as which he selected Richard Clement Moody to found British Columbia. He was created Baron Lytton of Knebworth in 1866.

Bulwer-Lytton's works were well known in his time. He coined famous phrases like "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", "dweller on the threshold", "the great unwashed", and the opening phrase (incipit) "It was a dark and stormy night". The sardonic Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, held annually from 1982 to 2024, claimed to seek the "opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels".

Life

Bulwer was born on 25 May 1803 to General William Earle Bulwer of Heydon Hall and Wood Dalling, Norfolk, and Elizabeth Barbara Lytton, daughter of Richard Warburton Lytton of Knebworth House, Hertfordshire. He had two older brothers, William Earle Lytton Bulwer (1799–1877) and Henry (1801–1872; later Baron Dalling and Bulwer).

His father died and his mother moved to London when he was four years old. When he was 15, a tutor named Wallington, who tutored him at Ealing, encouraged him to publish an immature work: Ishmael and Other Poems. Around this time, Bulwer fell in love, but the woman's father induced her to marry another man. She died about the time that Bulwer went to Cambridge and he stated that her loss affected all his subsequent life.

In 1822 Bulwer-Lytton entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met John Auldjo, but soon moved to Trinity Hall. In 1825 he won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for English verse. In the following year he took his BA degree and printed for private circulation a small volume of poems, Weeds and Wild Flowers. He purchased an army commission in 1826, but sold it in 1829 without serving.

In August 1827, he married Rosina Doyle Wheeler (1802–1882), a noted Irish beauty, but against the wishes of his mother, who withdrew his allowance, forcing him to work for a living. They had two children, Emily Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton (1828–1848), and (Edward) Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831–1891) who became Governor-General and Viceroy of British India (1876–1880). His writing and political work strained their marriage and his infidelity embittered Rosina. According to Sir Edmund Gosse, the poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy was one of Bulwer Lytton's many children born out of wedlock.

In 1833, they separated acrimoniously and in 1836 the separation became legal. Three years later, Rosina published Cheveley, or the Man of Honour (1839), satirising her husband's hypocrisy.

In June 1858, when her husband was standing as parliamentary candidate for Hertfordshire, she denounced him at the hustings. He retaliated by threatening her publishers, withholding her allowance and denying her access to their children. Finally he had her committed to a mental asylum, but she was released a few weeks later after a public outcry. This she chronicled in a memoir, A Blighted Life (1880). She continued attacking her husband's character for several years.

The death of Bulwer's mother in 1843 meant his "exhaustion of toil and study had been completed by great anxiety and grief", and by "about the January of 1844, I was thoroughly shattered".

In his mother's room at Knebworth House, which he inherited, he "had inscribed above the mantelpiece a request that future generations preserve the room as his beloved mother had used it". It remains hardly changed to this day.

On 20 February 1844, in accordance with his mother's will, he changed his surname from Bulwer to Bulwer-Lytton and assumed the arms of Lytton by royal licence. His widowed mother had done the same in 1811. His brothers remained plain "Bulwer".