Henry Mayhew interviews a former London pickpocket, turned patterer; grew up in Shropshire, father a Wesleyan minister:
"...I have read Paine, and Valney, and Holyoake, those infidel writers, and have also read the works of Bulwer, Dickens and numbers of others..."
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book, Serial / periodical
Have you read 'Zanoni'? And do you relish the gathering up of dropped (or strewed) Platonisms, & forming them into such a crown of glory, - of holy radiance, as the moral of that book? Nothing wd. beforehand have persuaded me that such an allegory as that wd. be given us in our day, - though I had caught glimpses in Bulwer's mind of higher powers & better thoughts than he had been used to give out. But this book is such a spring above all his former efforts - such a soaring - as has surprised me: - & others, to judge by the pertinacity of some people in declaring that he cd. not have meant the allegory we hold between our hands; - a thing they might as well say of the maker of a clock, or a county map.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
'This book has helped me incalculably in surmounting coterie-notions of the nature of another life, as well as of the objects of this.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
'I do not defend the bad construction of his story. I lament it, & can only wonder what bewitches us all, - us story-makers, - that we cannot make a story, - Boz, Bulwer, myself & others - while some excel in that particular art whom we do not at all envy in other respects.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
[Thackeray] 'Cd not endure Bulwer - no nature - nor Dickens - yet mentioned with greatest praise the Chap: before death of little Dombey.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Makepeace Thackeray Print: Book
[Letter to Aunt dated 3 February 1832] I do not think any books so bad to read as a newspaper. [...]If you ever read novels, do send for Eugene Aram. Miss Hobart and I have just read it, and thought it well done. ...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Anne Lister Print: Book
'[William Robertson] Nicoll's boyhood reading included Scott, Disraeli, the Brontes, Bulwer Lytton, Shelley, Johnson, Addison, Steele, Goldsmith, Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow ...' [Nicoll's father a Scottish clergyman who amassed library of 17,000 volumes.]
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Robertson Nicoll Print: Book
June Badeni on readings by 13-year-old Alice Thompson, as recorded in her notebook: 'She has been reading more of Scott and Dickens, is plunging through the novels of George Eliot... has sampled Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Thompson Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Private in an infantry regiment, formerly a skilled painter, age eighteen. Spends evenings painting, reading, working on model airplanes. Has attended art school....Patronizes Free Library. Has read The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Bulwer Lytton, Ballantyne, Henty, Robinson Crusoe, Quentin Dirward, Ivanhoe, Waverley, Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Two Years before the Mast, as well as the travels of David Livingstone, Fridtjof Nansen, Matthew Peary and Scott of the Antarctic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
'Since seeing Captain Blackwood yesterday I have read over 'Night and Morning'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Oliphant Print: Book
'Thank you very much for the Magazine - I am charmed with "St Stephen's". It is Sir Edward's, of course.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Oliphant Print: Serial / periodical
'How delightful are Sir Edward's Essays. One seems to see his own special creation, the accomplished man of the world, not entirely worldly, a quintessence of social wisdom and experience, sweetened by imagination'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Oliphant Print: Book
Emily Bronte, diary paper for 26 June 1837: 'Monday evening June 26 1837
A bit past 4 o'clock Charolotte [sic] working in Aunts room Branwell reading "Eugene Aram" to her ...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Branwell Bronte Print: Book
'Next to Robinson Crusoe, Rider liked the Arabian Nights, The Three Musketeers and the poems of Edgar Allan Poe and Macaulay. His two favourite novels were Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities and The Coming Race, a fantasy novel by Bulwer Lytton (the uncle of Sir Henry Bulwer, a Norfolk neighbour and friend of Squire Haggard who was to play a decisive part in Rider's life).'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Rider Haggard Print: Book
'[Edwin] Whitlock... borrowed books from a schoolmaster and from neighbours: "Most of them would now be considered very heavy literature for a boy of fourteen or fifteen, but I didn't know that, for I had no light literature for comparison. I read most of the novels of Dickens, Scott, Lytton and Mrs Henry Wood, 'The Pilgrim's Progress' and 'The Holy War' - an illustrated guide to Biblical Palestine, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', several bound volumes of religious magazines, 'The Adventures of a Penny', and sundry similar classics". With few books competing for his attention, he could freely concentrate on his favorite reading, "A set of twelve thick volumes of Cassell's 'History of England'".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Whitlock Print: Book
'That fall [Maud Montgomery] was enthralled by a book called "Zanoni", an occult love story written by an English nobleman named Edward Bulwer-Lytton. She read and re-read "Zanoni"... until she knew whole chunks of it by heart... She was so in love with its dark, masterful hero that she actually spent hours rewriting some of Lord Lytton's story so that the heroine's dialogue and behaviour would read more like dialogue and behaviour that would be hers if she were "Zanoni"'s heroine.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Maud Montgomery Print: Book
'I have begun Bulwer's Rienzi, wishing to examine his treatment of an historical subject'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot Print: Book
'I have been seeking 'Falkland' here for a long time without success. Those beautiful extracts of it which you showed me at Tealby haunted me incessantly.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
'I don't know whether I shall lose your good opinion forever if I tell you a true thing; but I had rather you knew the worst: - that I am intensely enjoying, this day or two, "The Lost Tales of Miletus".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
'Struggling away at "Fables in Song" .'
Unknown
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson
'All right, I'll see what I can do. Before I could answer, I had to see the book; and my good father, after trying at all our libraries, bought it for me. I like the book; that is, some of it; and I'll try to lick up four or five pages for the "Fortnightly."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: BookManuscript: Letter
?Friday. I have got on rather better with the ?Fables?; perhaps it won?t be a failure, though I still fear...Saturday...I just finished some of the deedest rubbish about Lord Lytton?s ?Fables?, that an intelligent editor ever shot into his waste paper basket.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
'Stopped at home all the evening really fascinated with Bulwer's "My Novel", got in fact so excited with the story that I became unable quietly to read on regularly, but leaving the details for another time gloated over the plot, and the Finish.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Book
'Came home read a little of my Novel smoked a Cigar and went quietly to bed.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Book
'Spent the evening at home reading "Night & Morning".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Lady Margaret Cocks, 30 August 1832:
'As soon as breakfast is over, I read a chapter from the Hebrew Bible [...] and then I hear my
brothers read Greek; at two we are so patriarchal as to dine: and afterwards I go out upon a
donkey [...] & read Pelham, & do many idle things'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Julia Martin, 14 December 1832:
'I have been reading Bulwer's novels & Mrs Trollope's libels, & Dr Parr's works [...] [Mrs
Trollope] has neither the delicacy nor the candour which constitute true nobility of mind [...]
Bulwer has quite delighted me: he has all the dramatic talent which Scott has: & all the
passion which Scott has not -- and he appears to me to be besides a far profounder
discriminator of character. There are some very fine things in his Denounced [sic].'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
'i have read Bulwer's "Rienzi" and yours also. I always thought your tragedy the best of your works, and I think so still. It is a glorious thing. I like Bulwer's too, very much, but unless there were historical ground for the love between a Colonna and the family of Rienzi, he has injured his work by the introduction. It is so palpably an imitation of the tragedy and with much less effect...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Howitt Print: Book
'I have been reading with much encreased admiration Paul Clifford - It is a wonderful, a sublime book - What will Bulwer become? the first Author of the age? I do not doubt it - he is a magnificent writer'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
' I was much gratified by your giving me Eugene Aram to do - & then just as I was setting to it "tooth and nail" - some events in the family of a friend of mine forced me to go out of town, & took all my attention forcibly away from my task. However my article is now in full progress - & I write to tell you so that you may expect it next week. One thing I am plagued about - Colburn has been too stingy to give me a copy - & getting it from a library it is continually sent for back
It is a wonderful and divine book - though so very sad'
[Letter to John Bowring]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
'Is Godolphin by Henry Bulwer? Pray tell me - Do you remember promising to lend me the letters of Horace Walpole when they came out - [Now] If you were very good and wished [much] to please me you would send them and [Trevyllian] Trevellian - which I should like to read as being by the person who wrote Marriage in High Life'
[Letter to Charles Ollier]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 17 March 1842:
'In regard to Zanoni, I think with you that there is much in it, one wd yearn to see cast out of it,
in reverence to the unity of the whole [goes on to comment on text in further detail]'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Robert Browning to Alfred Domett, 13 July 1842:
'Sir L. Bulwer has just published a set of sing-songs -- I read two, or one, in a Review -- &
thought them abominable.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Print: Serial / periodical
Robert Browning to Alfred Domett, 5 March 1843:
'Here we are sound asleep. Bulwer's new Novel, "The Last of the Barons," is to be, he says,
the last of Bulwer's -- and seems a poor affair, if one may judge by the single extract I have
seen.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Print: Serial / periodical
'How detestably Sir Edward Bulwer speaks of Shelley in his life of Schiller. - he thinks to gain popularity by truckling to the times - and mistakes the spirit of the times, & casts an indelible stain on his own name, as long as it survives.'
[letter to Edward Moxon]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 21 March 1843:
'Notwithstanding my admiration of Bulwer, I had the hardest & most laborious work passing
through his "Last of the Barons" (May it be the last of his romances wrought after such a
fashion!) [...] There are threads of golden beauty [...] the sub-stuff being strong, & stiff, &
useful -- very good stout history [...] but as for romance & poetic Art, the Goddess of useful
knowledge has set her face against them.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
'I stumbled on the following in a work of Bulwer's published in /41 - it is curious. Speaking of France he says: "The vast masses of energy & life broken up by the great thaw of the imperial system, floating along the tide are terrible icebergs for the vessel of the state. Some think Napoleonism [he ought to say revolutionism - MS's comment] over - its effects are only begun [underlined by MS] Society is shattered from one end to the other, & I laught at the little rivers by which they think to keep it together.[end underlining] - the last is curious.' [MS does not close her quotation marks]
[letter to Claire Clairmont]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, letter postmarked 15 August 1845:
'I have read those novels [i.e. Alice, and Ernest Maltravers, mentioned by Barrett in letter postmarked 13 August] -- but I must keep that word of words, "genius" -- for something different -- "talent" will do here surely.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Print: Book
Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, letter postmarked 15 August 1845:
'I have read those novels [i.e. Alice, and Ernest Maltravers, mentioned by Barrett in letter postmarked 13 August] -- but I must keep that word of words, "genius" -- for something different -- "talent" will do here surely.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 6 January 1846:
'I forgot quite to quarrel with you a little about Sir E Lytton Bulwer [sic] -- because indeed I dislike his dissertation on cold water as much as anything I have read lately. I [italics]know[end italics] the Malvern Hills, you will be reminded -- & when I think of that peculiar climate where people with delicate chests stand upon the mountain-slopes (such a beautiful country!) & breathe razors [...] I do marvel that any man of common sense can keep his countenance & recommend that situation as a substitute for Italy & Madeira to pulmonary patients [comments further on same subject].'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Print: Serial / periodical
Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Arabella Moulton-Barrett, 12 March 1850:
'Robert is reading "the Caxtons" & is much pleased with the book. [italics]I[end italics] am reading "Shirley", and am interested -- only it does not seem to me equally suggestive of power (so far) with Jane Eyre.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Print: Book
'My mother started to read to me when I was very young indeed. She read aloud beautifully and never got tired, and she would never, from the first, read anything that she could not enjoy herself, which cut out all the poor quality writing which every right-minded child loves when he can get it. Her only concession was one weekly comic, "Rainbow". But apart from that, I was reared on a fine mixed diet of Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne, Dickens, Stevenson, Hans Andersen, Kenneth Grahame and Kipling – especially Puck of Pook’s Hill whose three magnificent stories of Roman Britain were the beginning of my own passion for the subject, and resulted in the fullness of time in The Eagle of the Ninth. Hero myths of Greece and Rome I had, in an unexpurgated edition which my mother edited herself as she went along, and Norse and Saxon and Celtic legends. There were Whyte Melville’s The Gladiators and Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii and Weigal’s Egyptian Princess; for my mother loved historical novels – history of any kind, though her view of it was always the minstrel’s rather than the historian’s.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Rosemary Sutcliff Print: Book
'In the evening Polly was so deeply interested in a ghost story written by Lord Lytton & said to be the foundation of a "Strange Story" by that nobleman that she left everything go to the bad'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Polly Castieau Print: Unknown
John Gibson Lockhart to John Wilson Croker, 6 August 1846:
'The "Modern Timon" is not, I think, by a [italics]poet[end italics], but it is the work of a clever man, and who understands the construction of lines and the rhythm, and in short, all that people can learn without inspiration. I should suspect the Timon to be by Bulwer or Disraeli, or possibly Dicky Milnes'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Gibson Lockhart Print: Book
19 May 1854:
'My birthday [...] No cause of congratulations to me, alas, to have completed another year, when more than ever I should wish to be as young as I feel ... The chapter in My Novel [by Bulwer-Lytton] on courage and patience is admirable. It ought to be useful to me.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Guest Print: Unknown
'Early in 1888 my grandmother was taken ill, and my sister Mary and I went daily to Albert Hall Mansions to help my eldest sister and do errands for her. I spent many hours sitting on the floor by one of the rosewood vaneer book cases, which I still possess, reading a varied assortment of works ranging from the Ehtics of Aristotle, through all the nineteenth century poets, down to the poems of Bulwer Lytton, written under the name of Owen Meredith.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Zoe Procter Print: Book
Charlotte Bronte to her publisher, W. S. Williams, 19 November 1849:
'I have read the "Caxtons," I have looked at "Fanny Hervey," I think I will not write what I think of either — should I see you I will speak it.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charlotte Brontë Print: Book
'Still here [in camp] doing nothing and enjoying books. One book Ernest Maltravers by Lytton has impressed me very much.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: John Owen Maddox Print: Book
'On many nights I would sit beside the kitchen fire, listening to my father reading or telling tales. There was no wireless then and no gramophones, and our fireside talk was little different from that which had been going on for generations by any Connaught fireside ... At other times my father would read to me from a book. These tales were usually of the "creepy" variety—Thrawn Janet; or one of Marion Crawford's uncanny stories; or Green Tea, or The Watcher, by that master of the macabre, Sheridan Le Fanu; or the most vivid ghost story in English, Bulwer Lytton's The Haunted and the Haunters; and many another tooth-chattering tale, as Stevenson called them.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Desmond Malone Print: Book
'Harold'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Good Print: Book
'I've been frightfully lazy today: it's been
too hot to do anything. Pater was a gem: he
brought my breakfast up about 9.30 and I didn't
get up until eleven. I read "Getting Together",
a pro-American little book by Ian Hay—he
has been out to America for the Government to
establish a feeling of goodwill and the book is
what he has discovered about the Yankees. Have
been reading Bulwer-Lytton's "Last Days of
Pompeii" this afternoon. It is awfully
interesting, especially as I have seen
Pompeii.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Dora Willatt Print: Book
