Book Review: Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters by Leslie Mitchell. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2003.

Leslie Mitchell. Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2003. Pp. xxi + 292. $29.95. £19.95. (Distributed in the United States and Canada by Palgrave Macmillan.)

Scholars of the nineteenth-century literary world have special reason for excitement at the appearance of this study of Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803–73). The pulse may not necessarily quicken at the prospect of a biography published in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of a now largely unread Victorian man of letters. Yet, when it is added that Bulwer Lytton was a serious rival to Dickens, commanding the extraordinary advance of £30,000 from a publisher in 1850 for a ten-year contract to produce a cheap edition of his novels (128), we must immediately sit up. What we have in this fine new book by Leslie Mitchell is both a biographical portrait (the first for some years) and something approaching a historical-literary detective story. How do we explain the near-total eclipse of a writer who is buried in Westminster Abbey and whose novel The Last Days of Pompeii had gone through thirty-two editions before 1914?

One of the answers, Mitchell makes clear, is that Lytton was one of those nineteenth-century figures who is extremely difficult to categorize. His novels fall into different types, ranging from...