Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (18 page)

In August 1827, Bulwer (as he was called in early life) took a fatal misstep by marrying for love. Rosina Wheeler (1802–82) was Irish by birth – not a recommendation. When her mother fled her brutal husband, ten-year-old Rosina had been taken under the wing of an uncle, John Doyle, the Governor of Guernsey. She grew up a beauty, witty but (by the standards of Bulwer’s circle) penniless. The courtship was ominously stormy and the match was implacably opposed by Bulwer’s mother. In the most drastic of parental rebukes, she cut her disobedient son off without a penny.

It forced him into writing fashionable novels – not in the 1820s a profession for the fashionable. But he had a remarkably adaptive mind. What were people reading? He identified the popular appetite and hit the mark in 1828 with
Pelham
, a mystery story with murder, madness and seduction in high-life as its mainspring. Marketed by the notorious Henry Colburn,
Pelham
was a bestseller and promoted its author to the top of that elite league of novelists who could command £1,000 a title. It was
read everywhere and had a lasting effect not merely on genre (‘silver fork’) fiction but on gentlemen’s dress. In one of his digressions the hero lays down twenty-two ‘Maxims’ as to how the gentleman should array himself. The most momentous was Maxim 17: ‘Avoid many colours; and seek, by some one prevalent and quiet tint, to sober down the others. Apelles used only four colours, and always subdued those which were more florid, by a darkening varnish.’

Pelham
’s maxims drove the Scottish sage, Thomas Carlyle, into paroxysmic satire on the ‘philosophy of clothes’, in
Sartor Resartus
. The tailors and leaders of fashion fell into line, however. The Bennet girls, in Jane Austen’s novel, are thrown into a collective flutter when Mr Bingley calls at Longbourn in a vivid blue coat. Thirty years later, the eligible young man would have been dressed as for a funeral. Bulwer was not merely the new Byron but the new Brummel.

Between 1827 and 1834 Bulwer published eight full-length novels. He won a seat in Parliament and threw himself into the cause of political reform. He was marked as a rising man. Success on the literary and political fronts was, however, marred by spectacular domestic failure. On a trip to Italy in 1834 to research
The Last Days of Pompeii
, relations between him and Rosina broke down. It did not help that, as gossip reported, Bulwer was accompanied by his mistress. There were, by now, two children. A legal separation was enacted in April 1836 and two years later Rosina’s children were forcibly removed from her on the grounds of maternal neglect. It was untrue, but Edward wanted custody of his son, the eventual heir to Knebworth. The law was firmly biased towards the father in cases where wealth and titles were at stake. Rosina felt he could quite well make do with his three illegitimate children.

In the same year, Lytton became a baronet, a title of which he was inordinately proud. In the rage of losing her children, Rosina wrote a furious
roman-à-clef, Cheveley; or, The Man of Honour
(1839). It regaled the world with Bulwer’s brutalities, his meanness (he kept her on a meagre allowance of £400 p.a.) and his gross, bastard-spawning adulteries. Over the subsequent years, Rosina bombarded the press with ‘revelations’ of Edward’s infamy and confected innumerable lawsuits. She wrote as many as twenty letters a day to his clubs, with obscenities scrawled on the envelopes. Although his lawyers frightened off the better class of publisher, she turned out a stream of frantic revenge novels. Her cause was taken up by the satirists of the time, notably Thackeray, who launched his early career with hilarious squibs against the ‘Knebworth Apollo’.

Lytton bore it all stoically, taking consolation in his mistresses, his opium pipe (there is a fine picture of him sucking one the size of an Alpine horn), his catamites (as gossip fantasised), and his increasing stature as a novelist. What had shaped
up as a promising political career ended when in 1841 he resigned his seat in Parliament and effectively withdrew from public life. But he inherited the Knebworth Estate in 1843 and with it a huge fortune. He needed no longer to write for money and entered on the most interesting phase of his authorial career. His writing is preposterously high-flown (Thackeray was right about that), but he has a remarkable list of innovations to his credit. With
Pelham
he founded the fashionable genre. With
Paul Clifford
(1830) and
Eugene Aram
(1832) he pioneered novels which dealt intelligently with crime.
Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur
and, more distantly, the toga melodramas of Cecil B. DeMille can be seen as the progeny of
The Last Days of Pompeii. Zanoni
(1842), a ‘mystical mystery’, inaugurated several works on the paranormal (most readably, the long short story, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, 1859).
The Caxtons, A Family Picture
(1849) and its sequels made fashionable ‘domestic’ fiction of the Barchester kind.
The Coming Race
(1871), his last substantial work, is a hollow-earth fantasy, introducing subterranean aliens with new, electric technologies who will one day invade the surface of the planet, so fulfilling ‘the Darwinian proposition’. H. G. Wells, one suspects, could have recited
The Coming Race
by heart.

By mid-century, Lytton (as he now was) had put his public life back together again. His private life was something else. He had callously abandoned his daughter Emily to die of typhus fever in a London lodging house. Her body was brought back to the magnificent family house at Knebworth and it was given out to the world that she had expired there, by her loving father’s side. It is the most despicable of Lytton’s actions – unless one credits Rosina’s allegation that he once hired an assassin to poison her. She had not even been informed her daughter was ill, a fact she furiously publicised. As always, he rose above her ‘calumnies’ and, with the help of powerful friends, suppressed any mention of them in the press.

In the early 1850s, Lytton, now a land-owning Whig, decided to return to politics. This second parliamentary career began well with his appointment as Colonial Secretary in Lord Derby’s ministry. But Rosina haunted him, like a witch’s curse. When he and Dickens (a firm friend) put on a charity dramatic performance at the Duke of Devonshire’s house in 1851, Rosina threatened to turn up as Nell Gwyn, the orange girl. A nervous Dickens consulted his Scotland Yard friend, Inspector Charles Field (‘Bucket’ in Bleak House) and posted private detectives at the door. She could make such occasions very awkward.

Her harassments climaxed at Hertford, in June 1858, where Edward was publicly canvassing. She heckled and was cheered on by the crowd who found the row more interesting than government policy. Lytton, driven to desperate remedies, had her abducted and incarcerated for a month in a private lunatic asylum. Tame doctors provided the necessary certification. The
Telegraph
, as part of its campaign
against Derby, took up her cause and she was released. But the episode gave Wilkie Collins his
donnée
for the plot of
The Woman in White
and the wicked baronet, Sir Percival Glyde. Rosina wrote to thank him. An eventual accommodation was reached between the warring couple. She was given a handsomely increased stipend and access to her son Robert, in return for keeping quiet. She fired off one last work of furious fiction in 1858 – the interestingly named
The World and his Wife, or a Person of Consequence: A Photographic Novel
– and otherwise did as instructed. But it was the end of Bulwer’s public career. He faded into political obscurity with the fall of the Derby ministry. At least he had his opium pipe.

What is his legacy? Dark clothes (
Reservoir Dogs
would not have been
Reservoir Dogs
without
Pelham
) is one. Another is the annual, widely publicised, competition sponsored by the English Department of San Jose University for the worst opening sentence to a novel, something, that is, as hilariously bad as
Paul Clifford
’s:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

A third is Knebworth House which, as horrifically ‘restored’ by Bulwer, will be familiar as the ultra-gothic setting to films such as
The Omen
and
Eyes Wide Open,
while Knebworth’s rolling grounds have hosted England’s biggest open air pop concerts. Lytton’s ghost, those who have slept in his house testify, ‘walks’. It is nice to think how annoyed he would be by the Rolling Stones strutting around his estate.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

There is a sense in which Benjamin Disraeli was always young, just as his great opposite, William Ewart Gladstone (who formed his last Cabinet at the age of eighty-three), was always old. Between them, these colossi of Victorian Westminster
epitomise a perennial contradiction in British and American politics: we want our leaders to have the energy of youth, but we also want them to have the gravitas of age.

Among his minor achievements, Disraeli was the first politician to introduce hairstyle into politics – something which Byron and Bulwer-Lytton had done for literature a few years earlier. His mop of oiled, jet-black ringlets remained the delight of cartoonists throughout his long career. His hair proclaimed his youth, even in age.

Disraeli’s is a wonderful career. The grandson of a humble Jewish immigrant, he clambered up the slippery pole (his term) of politics to the very top. It is a tribute not merely to him but to the openness of what seems at first glance the most closed of political institutions – the British Conservative Party. He had, it must be said, assistance. Benjamin’s father, the reclusive scholar Isaac D’Israeli, a non-practising Jew, had his newborn son circumcised according to Jewish rites. But, prudently, he also had the boy baptised in the Church of England at the age of thirteen.

This dual allegiance inspired in Disraeli what one of his biographers, Jane Ridley, terms the ‘Marrano mentalité’ of the covert Jew. That mental facility aided him in the fluidly strategic shifts of his early party affiliations. In the course of eight years, the young Disraeli was by turns radical, Tory, loyal supporter of his party leader, rebel, and – arguably – back-stabbing traitor. Did Disraeli actually believe in the protectionist arguments he used to bring down his leader in 1846, thus clearing a necessary space for himself at the top? One doesn’t know, but tactical treachery would have been quite in character.

As with party, so with sex. The young Disraeli was a gigolo, prepared to sacrifice any woman to the needs of his career (or any man – he may, it is speculated, have had homosexual moments in his youth). He discarded his first mistress, Henrietta Sykes, when she became an embarrassment. He proposed to the widow of his patron Wyndham Lewis, a less than dazzlingly beautiful woman twelve years older than he was – allegedly, according to his opponents, while the coroner was still clumping around in the house. It was Mary Anne’s jointure he needed. His debts were such that, were it not for the immunity from arrest for debt given to Members of Parliament, Disraeli would surely have found himself in the clink. By the early 1840s, he owed thousands.

His debut in fiction, the ‘silver fork’ novel of high life,
Vivian Grey
, was published in 1827 to pay off some earlier vexatious debts. There was uproar when the anonymous novelist – presumed to be someone of importance – was revealed to be a nobody ‘and a Jew!’ Similarly flashy-trashy-but-very-clever works followed:
The Young Duke
(1831),
Contarini Fleming
(1832) and
Alroy
(1833). These extravaganzas
brought in welcome cash for the author and even more for his unscrupulous publisher, Henry Colburn. They established Disraeli as a leader of the ‘fashnabble’ novelists (as a contemptuous, but not yet so successful, Thackeray labelled them).

This first career in fiction ended in 1837 when, after three attempts, Disraeli finally made it into Parliament as Tory member for Maidstone. His second career was launched in the early 1840s. He had by now put himself at the head of the reformist ‘Young England’ clique which was at odds with the party leader, Robert Peel. To promote his Conservative cause Disraeli published (with Colburn again) a trilogy of powerful political novels:
Coningsby
(1844),
Sybil
(1845) and
Tancred
(1847). In them he outlined his creed: an amalgam of neo-feudalist nostalgia, a disdain for the bourgeois (‘Dutch’) so-called ‘revolution’ of 1688, high Anglicanism, and ‘one nation’ utopianism.
Tancred
asserts his favourite religious proposition, that Christianity is merely the ‘completion’ of Judaism and as dependent upon it as a house on its foundations. But no words from any novel have reverberated so much through the discourse of British politics as the famous remark of the working-class aristocrat Stephen Morley in
Sybil
to the blue-blood friend of the people, Egremont, in the ruins of an abbey, symbolising old England:

‘Well, society may be in its infancy,’ said Egremont slightly smiling; ‘but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed.’

‘Which nation?’ asked the younger stranger, ‘for she reigns over two.’