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Literary Review
Everywhere man
IN Victorian surveys of contemporary fiction, Edward Bulwer Lytton was often grouped in a triumvirate with Dickens, who admired him, and Thackeray, who reviled him. Later readers have inclined towards neglect, or to Thackeray's view of him as a pompous charlatan. These two volumes celebrating the bicentenary of his birth seek to revise such views.
Allan Conrad Christensen's editorial introduction to the 17 essays collected in The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton explains the slightly misleading title. It refers to Bulwer's "self-subverting", in his interest in divided characters, and in his chameleon shifts between genres, opinions and political parties. Andrew Brown's opening essay mounts the strongest possible defence of this self-subverting. He argues persuasively that Bulwer's "unrivalled ubiquity" in literary genres makes him pivotal in Victorian culture. No other novelist contributed so widely to different kinds of fiction, often at the innovative early stages. He wrote fashionable novels, Newgate novels, historical, domestic, supernatural, and science-fiction novels; he also wrote essays, poetry, drama and history. The range of articles in this collection supports Brown's claim that an acquaintance with Bulwer's work is crucial to understanding Victorian literature. The major omission is Bulwer's successful career as a dramatist. "The Lady of Lyons", in particular, was a great theatrical hit, and "Richelieu" provided his one line still active in the public domain: "The pen is mightier than the sword".
Some essays argue that Bulwer's early fiction in particular contributed significantly to narrative innovation. Richard Cronin suggests that, in cross-fertilising the fashionable and Newgate novels, Bulwer provided the Victorian social novel with the structural device of juxtaposing mutually reflective upper and lower social worlds. In a close study of the trial scenes in Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram, Jonathan Grossman argues persuasively that they effected a "paradigm shift" in narrative representation of criminals, moving to a double, non-judgemental perspective which allowed inwardness with the dock. Several essays deal with Bulwer's use of fiction to explore the problems of democratic government. Esther Schor's interesting essay on Rienzi, the liveliest of the historical novels, describes the way it treats a people's failure to rise to the challenge of democracy. She generously suggests that Bulwer's theatrical presentation of Rienzi himself explores the performative aspects of leadership. Bulwer was at his most self-subverting in Rienzi, which, as Schor says, seems designed to be read as both for and against Italian nationalism.
Catherine Phillips compares the preoccupations and narrative methods of Rienzi to those of Bulwer's next published work, the two-volume history, Athens: Its Rise and Fall. The impressive bicentennial edition of this work by Oswyn Murray includes 63 pages of extracts transcribed from the manuscript of the unpublished third volume, and an editorial introduction placing Bulwer in the tradition of Greek historiography. Both Murray and Phillips argue for Bulwer's importance in anticipating Grote's claims for the significance of Athens as a democratic model; both speculate whether Bulwer abandoned the work before he reached the "Fall", and the difficult issues of decline, through fears of rivalry from the professional historians. Perhaps such topics, promised in the third volume extracts, as "the struggle between property and numbers", and the "forced and exotic" democracies established in the Greek colonies, presented intractable problems of representation to this radical politician, landowner and future Secretary of State for the Colonies. After the 1830s, the interests of property tend to predominate in Bulwer's work. In a persuasive reading of the immensely popular 1850s Caxtons trilogy of domestic fiction, Peter Sinnema argues that the central value is veneration for property, transmitted through a series of male mentor-apprentice relations.
A collection of articles is probably the best approach to Bulwer. His constant reinvention of himself, his compulsive search for new genres, his extensive revisions to later editions of his works, especially the provocative early works such as Pelham and Eugene Aram, make him difficult for one writer to represent. Ubiquity, not coherence, was his strength. He was always there, whether, as Murray reveals, corresponding about naval battles with Edward Codrington, the disgraced victor of Navarino, or, in the ending of his last completed, posthumously published novel, The Parisians, contemplating the defeat of the Paris Commune. Few readers who encounter one Bulwer novel would be likely to pursue their reading. The formidable range suggested by these two volumes should attract new attention to Bulwer from such readers, who might otherwise feel that Thackeray, in his relentless pursuit of "Bulwig", had got it about right.
The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections, edited by Allan Conrad Christensen, University of Delaware Press, p.258, £34.95. 0 87413 856 6
Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Edward Bulwer Lytton, edited by Oswyn Murray, Routledge, p.610, £75. 0 415 32087 9
The Times Literary Supplement
ANTHEA TRODD
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