[In which the gentle reader encounters such staples of Victorian fiction as cumbersome scene setting, picturesque members of "the lower orders" with distinctly plebian names, a deathbed scene, a child of unknown parentage, and gratuitously polysyllabic diction.]

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 house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness [For starters, why not "swept up the London streets"?]. Through one of the obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little loved by the gentlemen of the police, a man, evidently of the lowest orders, was wending his solitary way. He stopped twice or thrice at different shops and houses of a description correspondent with the appearance of the quartier in which they were situated,--and tended inquiry for some article or another which did not seem easily to be met with [Quartier gives the scene some ton]. All the answers he received were couched in the negative; and as he turned from each door he muttered to himself, in no very elegant phraseology, his disappointment and discontent.

At length, at one house, the landlord, a sturdy butcher, after rendering the same reply the inquirer had hitherto received, added,--"But if this vill do as vell, Dummie, it is quite at your sarvice!" Pausing reflectively for a moment, Dummie responded, that he thought the thing proffered might do as well; and thrusting it into his ample pocket he strode away with as rapid a motion as the wind and rain would allow. He soon came to a nest of low and dingy buildings, at the entrance to which, in half-effaced characters was written "Thames Court." Having at the most conspicuous of these buildings, an inn or alehouse through the half-closed windows of which blazed out in ruddy comfort the beams of the hospitable hearth, he knocked hastily at the door. He was admitted by a lady of a certain age, and endowed with a comely rotundity of face and person [Could our optics be viewing a Victorian progenitrix of Roseanne Barr?].

"Hast got it, Dummie?" said she quickly, as she closed the door on the guest.

"Noa, noa! not exactly--but as I thinks as ow . . ."

"Pish, you fool!" cried the woman interrupting him, peevishly. "Vy, it is no use desaving me. You knows you has only stepped from my boosing ken to another, and you has not been arter the book at all. So there's the poor cretur a-raving and a-dying, and you . . ."

"Let I speak!" interrupted Dummie in his turn. "I tells you I vent first to Mother Bussblone's, who, I knows, chops the whiners morning and evening to the young ladies, and I axes there for a Bible, and she says, says she, 'I 'as only a "Companion to the Halter!" but you'll get a Bible, I thinks, as Master Talkins,--the cobbler, as preaches.' So I goes to Master Talkins, and he says, says he, 'I 'as no call for the Bible--'cause vy?--I 'as a call vithout; but mayhap you'll be a-getting it at the butcher's hover the vay,--'cause vy?--the butcher'll be damned!" So I goes hover the vay, and the butcher says, says he, 'I 'as not a Bible: but I 'as a book of plays bound for all the world just like 'un, and mayhap the poor cretur mayn't see the difference.' So I takes the plays, Mrs. Margery, and here they be surely!--and how's poor Judy?"

"Fearsomo! she'll not be over the night, I'm a-athinking."

"Vell, I'll track up the dancers!"

So saying, Dummie ascended a doorless staircase, across the entrance of which a blanket, stretched angularly from the wall to the chimney, afforded a kind of screen; and presently he stood within a chamber, which the dark and painful genius of Crabbe might have delighted to portray. The walls were white-washed, and at sundry places strange figures and grotesque characters had been traced by some mirthful inmate, in such sable outline as the end of a smoked stick or the edge of a piece of charcoal is wont to produce. The wan and flickering light afforded by a farthing candle gave a sort of grimness and menace to these achievements of pictorial art, especially as they more than once received embellishment from portraits of Satan, such as he is accustomed to be drawn. A low fire burned gloomily in a the sooty grate; and on the hob hissed "the still small voice" of an iron kettle. On a round deal-table were two vials, a cracked cup, a broken spoon of some dull metal, and upon two or three mutilated chairs were scattered various articles of female attire. On another table, placed below a high, narrow, shutterless casement (athwart which, instead of a curtain, a checked apron had been loosely hung, and now waved fitfully to and fro in the gusts of wind that made easy ingress through many a chink and cranny), were a looking glass, sundry appliances of the toilet, a box of coarse rogue, a few ornaments of more show than value; and a watch, the regular and calm click of which produced that indescribably painful feeling which, we fear, many of our readers who have heard the sound in a sick chamber can easily recall.

A large tester-bed stood opposite to this table, and the looking-glass partially reflected curtains of a faded stripe, and ever and anon (as the position of the sufferer followed the restless emotion of a disordered mind), glimpses of the face of one on whom Death was rapidly hastening. Beside this bed now stood Dummie, a small, thin man, dressed in a tattered plush jerkin, from which the raindrops slowly dripped, and with a thin, yellow, cunning physiognomy, grotesquely hideous in feature but not positively villainous in expression. On the other side of the bed stood a little boy of about three years old, dressed as if belonging to the better classes, although the garb somewhat tattered and discolored. The poor child trembled violently, and evidently looked with a feeling of relief on the entrance of Dummie. And now there slowly, and with many a phthisical sigh, heaved towards the foot of the bed the heavy frame of the woman who had accosted Dummie below, and had followed him, haud passibus aequis, to the room of the sufferer; she stood with a bottle of medicine in her hand, shaking its contents up and down, and with a kindly yet timid compassion spread over a countenance crimsoned with habitual libations.

This made the scene; save that on a chair by the bed-side, lay a profusion of long glossy golden ringlets, which had been cut from the head of the sufferer when the fever had begun to mount upwards; but which, with a jealously that portrayed the darling littleness of a vain heart, she had seized and insisted on retaining near her; and save that, by the fire, perfectly inattentive to the event about to take place within the chamber, and to which we of the biped race attach so awful an importance, lay a large gray cat [Not a gargantuan quadruped of the feline kind?], curled in a ball, and dozing with half-shut eyes, and ears that now and then denoted, by a gentle inflection, the jar of a louder or nearer sound than usual upon her lethargic senses. The dying woman did not at first attend to the entrance either of Dummie or the female at the foot of the bed; but she turned herself round towards the child, and grasping his arm fiercely, she drew him towards her, and gazed on his terrified features with a look in which exhaustion and an exceeding wanness of complexion were even horribly contrasted by the glare and energy of delirium.

"If you are like him," she muttered, "I will strangle you,--I will!--ay--tremble! you ought to tremble, when your mother touches you, or when he is mentioned. You have his eyes,--you have! Out with them, out!--the devil sits laughing in them! Oh! you weep, do you, little one! Well now, be still, my love,--be hushed! I would not harm thee! harm--O God, he is my child after all!"--And at these words she clasped the boy passionately to her breast and burst into tears!

"Coom now, coom!" said Dummie, soothingly. "Take the stuff, Judith, and then ve'll talk over the urchin!"

The mother relaxed her grasp of the boy, and turning towards the speaker, gazed at him for some moments with a bewildered stare: at length she appeared slowly to remember him, and said, as she raised herself on one hand, and pointed the other towards him with an inquiring gesture,--

"Thou has brought the book?"

Dummie answered by lifting up the book he had brought from the honest butcher's.

"Clear the room, then!" said the sufferer, with an air of mock command so common to the insane. "We should be alone!"

Dummie winked at the good woman at the foot of the bed; and she (though generally no easy person to order or to persuade) left, without reluctance, the sick chamber.

"If she be a-going to prey!" murmured our landlady (for that office did the good matron hold), "I may indeed as well take myself off, for it's not werry comfortable like to those who be old to hear all that 'ere!"

With this pious reflection, the hostess of the Mug, so was the hostelry called, heavily descended the creaking stairs.

"Now, man!" said the sufferer, sternly: "swear that you will never reveal,--swear, I say! and by the great God, whose angels are about this night, if ever you break the oath, I will come back and haunt you to your dying day!"

Dummie's face grew pale, for he was superstitiously affected by the vehemence and the language of the dying woman, and he answered as he kissed the pretended Bible,--that he swore to keep the secret, as much as he knew of it, which, she must be sensible, he said, was very little. As he spoke, the wind swept with a loud and sudden gust down the chimney, and shook the roof above them so violently as to loosen many of the crumbling tiles, which fell one after the other, with a crashing noise, on the pavement below. Dummie started in affright; and perhaps his conscience smote him for the trick he had played with regard to the false Bible [The cat, did he forget the cat? What did the kitty do when the roof fell in?]. But the woman, whose excited and unstrung nerves led her astray from one subject to another with preternatural celerity, said, with an hysterical laugh, "See, Dummie, they come in state for me, give me the cap--yonder! and bring the looking-glass!"

Dummie obeyed, and the woman, as she in a low tone uttered something about the unbecoming color of the ribands, adjusted the cap on her head; and then saying in a regretful and petulant voice, "Why should they have cut off my hair?--such a disfigurement!" bade Dummie desire Mrs. Margery once more to ascend to her.

Left alone with her child, the face of the wretched mother softened as she regarded him, and all the levities and all the vehemences,--if we may use the word,--which, in the turbulent commotion of her delirium, had been stirred upward to the surface of her mind, gradually now sunk, as death increased upon her,--and a mother's anxiety rose to the natural level from which it had been disturbed and abased. She took the child to her bosom, and clasping him in her arms, which grew weaker with every instant, she soothed him with the sort of chant which nurses sing over their untoward infants; but her voice was cracked and hollow, and as she felt it was so, the mother's eyes filled with tears--Mrs. Margery now re-entered; and, turning towards the hostess with an impressive calmness of manner which astonished and awed the person she addressed, the dying woman point to the child and said,--

"You have been kind to me, very kind, and may God bless you for it! I have found that those whom the world calls the worst are often the most human. But I am not going to thank you as I ought to do, but to ask of you a last and exceeding favor. Protect my child till he grows up: you have often said you loved him,--you are childless yourself--and a morsel of bread and a shelter for the night, which is all I ask of you to give him, will not impoverish more legitimate claimants!"

Poor Mrs. Margery, fairly sobbing, vowed she would be a mother to the child, and that she would endeavor to rear him honestly, though a public-house was not, she confessed, the best place for good examples!

"Take him!" cried the mother hoarsely, as her voice, failing her strength, rattled indistinctly, and almost died within her. "Take him,--rear him as you will, as you can!--any example, any roof better than . . ." Here the words were inaudible. "And oh! may it be a curse, and a . . . Give me the medicine, I am dying."

The hostess, alarmed, hastened to comply; before she returned to the bedside the sufferer was insensible,--nor did she again recover speech or motion. A low and rare moan only testified continued life, and within two hours that ceased, and the spirit was gone. At that time our good hostess was herself beyond the things of this outer world, having supported her spirits during the vigils of the night with so many little liquid stimulants, that they finally sunk into that torpor which generally succeeds excitement. Taking, perhaps, advantage of the opportunity which the insensibility of the hostess afforded him, Dummie, by the expiring ray of the candle that burnt in the chamber, hastily opened a huge box (which was generally concealed under the bed, and contained the wardrobe of the deceased), and turned with irreverent hand over the linens and the silks, until quite at the bottom of the trunk he discovered some packets of letters;--these he seized, and buried in the conveniences of his dress. He then, rising and replacing the box, cast a longing eye towards the watch on the toilet-table, which was of gold; but he withdrew his gaze, and with a querulous sigh, observed to himself, "The old blowen kens o' that, od rat her! but howsomever, I'll take this; who knows but it may be of sarvice--tannies to-day may be smash tomorrow!" and he laid his coarse hand on the fold and silky tresses we have described. "'Tis a rum business and puzzles I! but mum's the word, for my own little colquarren."

With this brief soliloquy Dummie descended the stairs, and let himself out of the house.

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A favorable review from Richard Henry Dana's, Two Years Before the Mast (1841):

". . . one of the men said he had a book which 'told all about a great highway-man,' at the bottom of his chest, and producing it, I found, to my surprise and joy, that it was nothing else than Bulwer's Paul Clifford. This, I seized immediately, and going to my hammock, lay there, swinging and reading, until the watch was out. The between-decks were clear, the hatchways open, and a cool breeze blowing through them, the ship under easy way, and everything comfortable. I had just got well into the story, when eight bells were struck, and we were all ordered to dinner. After dinner came our watch on deck for four hours, and, at four o'clock, I went below again, turned into my hammock, and read until the dog watch. As no lights were allowed after eight o'clock, there was no reading in the night watch. Having light winds and calms, we were three days on the passage, and each watch below, during the daytime, I spent in the same manner, until I had finished my book. I shall never forget the enjoyment I derived from it. To come across anything with the slightest claims to literary merit, was so unusual, that this was a perfect feast to me. The brilliancy of the book, the succession of capital hits, lively and characteristic sketches, kept me in a constant state of pleasing sensations. It was far too good for a sailor. I could not expect such fine times to last long."

Gentle Reader, what do you think? What's to like or not like in the Bulwer's opening chapter? What can an aspiring writer learn from him about the proper unfolding of a tale? By modern standards, his method is ponderous, even maddeningly slow. His language is filled with euphemisms and circumlocutions.

Still, he does understand the principle of delayed revelation, heeding the advice of his contemporary, Wilkie Collins, who said that a good story should "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait." After the first paragraph we wonder why that stranger is "wending his solitary way" on a stormy night. It turns out he is going door to door in search of something, a book. But what book? Then we learn it is a Bible. But he returns with a book that only looks like a Bible. Why does he need it? And why might something that only looks like a Bible suffice? Ultimately, the reader learns that someone on a deathbed wants to swear someone else to a promise.

Bulwer's opening raises a series of questions or complications, answering some but leaving others unresolved. At chapter's end the reader is left in doubt about the parentage of the boy, especially the identity of the father whose eyes he has. And what upbringing will he receive at the hands of his unlikely foster mother, a stranger and an alcoholic? And what will be in the letters that Dummie hid in his clothing?

What do you think? Any comments you wish to add? Does Paul Clifford have any redeeming literary merit? Is Bulwer the victim of his own ineptitude or of changing literary tastes? Do you find some of the same shortcomings in Dickens, Collins, Trollope? Why are they still read and he isn't (relatively speaking)?

[#1] Several years ago I read most of B-L's novels when I was preparing the entries for a reference book entitled Dictionary of British Literary Characters. Pretentious, bombastic, snobbish and overblown? Yes indeed. But still a very interesting novelist who pioneered a number of new genres which others later developed with far more talent. I refer particularly to his crime of "Newgate Novels," of which Paul Clifford is one. I can recommend The Coming Race (1870)* one of his last and quite short. It is a variety of science-fiction novel in which the protagonist visits a society which exists under the earth and in which the women are larger, smarter and stronger than the men. Given B-L's views on women and treatment of his own wife, this is very interesting. His wife, Rosina, also published novels--most of then thinly disguised attacks on B-L himself--they were bitterly separated after about 10 years of marriage but lived to torment each other for several decades. . . . I must own to liking The Last of the Barons (about Warwick the Kingmaker). Also in Pelham, What Will He Do With It, and a few others B-L shows what the young men are doing when they are not in the drawing room with the ladies. A very interesting writer, but one who can really put off the reader.
-Barbara J. Dunlap, New York, New York

[Note: The Coming Race is credited with inspiring a secret society inside Hitler's SS, a society of hyper-zealots who believed in their innate superiority and the inevitability of their world dominance. I believe it was called the Vril Society, named after the power source that enables the Ana (pronounced Arna) to operate and govern their subterranean world (the Ana are also vegans). (Does anyone else out there know anything about this?) Lytton himself, by the way, in his social and political opinions, was extremely humane and in Parliament supported various reform policies. He would have been appalled to know what the Nazis did with his Utopian novel. (See Brian Aldiss's edition of The Coming Race, Broadview Press, 2002; or Matthew Sweet's Hesperus Press edition)]

There is a book out there about Lytton and his wife Rosina [Edward and Rosina by Michael Sadleir]. His mother so opposed the marriage that she temporarily disinherited him, and it was on his honeymoon in Italy that, out of financial desperation, he visited Pompeii, did research, and eventually wrote The Last Days of Pompeii. The biographer suggests that Lytton's mommy was right: Rosina was a nutcase (and Irish, to boot!). However, Bulwer and his wife seem to have deserved one another. For a generous treatment of an heroically dysfunctional marriage, see Leslie Mitchell's 2003 biography, Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters.

Some more Bulwer-Lytton trivia: With works like The Last Days of Pompeii; Rienzi; Harold, Last of the Saxon Kings; and The Last of the Barons, he is credited with inventing the historical novel as we know it; that is, circumstantially accurate depictions of life in past times and cultures. The concern for such accuracy by Walter Scott (an unjustly neglected author) was negligible. B-L is also credited with coining the term "the great unwashed," the first known appearance of which occurs in The Coming Race. If Bulwer-Lytton was nothing else, he was interesting.]

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