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Eugene Aram
Eugene Aram, a brilliant but reclusive scholar, lives in obscurity, devoting his life to arcane research. But he is gradually coaxed from his solitary lifestyle by his kindly old neighbour, Rowland Lester, and as Aram's visits to Lester become more frequent, he becomes more and more enamoured of beautiful Madeline Lester. And yet, despite the young lovers' apparent happiness, Aram seems to be hiding a dark secret. Meanwhile, Madeline's cousin Walter sets out to learn the fate of his long-lost father. His quest will lead to the discovery of a long-hidden and horrible crime and the trial of Eugene Aram for murder!
When "Eugene Aram" appeared in 1832, it drew mixed reactions: critics condemned it vehemently for romanticizing the life of a well-known convicted murderer, while the reading public eagerly snatched up copies of the novel. Controversial both for the artistic liberties Bulwer took with the facts of the case and for his ambivalent portrayal of his eponymous anti-hero, "Eugene Aram" remained nonetheless one of the most popular novels of the Victorian period.
This new scholarly edition includes the unabridged text of the original three-volume edition of 1832, together with an introduction and annotations by Ann-Barbara Graff. Also featured are appendices containing contemporary reviews of the novel, a parody by Thackeray, Bulwer's fragment of a tragedy about Aram, and other contextual documents.
When "Eugene Aram" appeared in 1832, it drew mixed reactions: critics condemned it vehemently for romanticizing the life of a well-known convicted murderer, while the reading public eagerly snatched up copies of the novel. Controversial both for the artistic liberties Bulwer took with the facts of the case and for his ambivalent portrayal of his eponymous anti-hero, "Eugene Aram" remained nonetheless one of the most popular novels of the Victorian period.
This new scholarly edition includes the unabridged text of the original three-volume edition of 1832, together with an introduction and annotations by Ann-Barbara Graff. Also featured are appendices containing contemporary reviews of the novel, a parody by Thackeray, Bulwer's fragment of a tragedy about Aram, and other contextual documents.
516 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1903
7 people are currently reading
106 people want to read
About the author
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
4,457 books222 followersEdward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC, was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician. Lord Lytton was a florid, popular writer of his day, who coined such phrases as "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", and the infamous incipit "It was a dark and stormy night."
He was the youngest son of General William Earle Bulwer of Heydon Hall and Wood Dalling, Norfolk and Elizabeth Barbara Lytton, daughter of Richard Warburton Lytton of Knebworth, Hertfordshire. He had two brothers, William Earle Lytton Bulwer (1799–1877) and Henry, afterwards Lord Dalling and Bulwer.
Lord Lytton's original surname was Bulwer, the names 'Earle' and 'Lytton' were middle names. On 20 February 1844 he assumed the name and arms of Lytton by royal licence and his surname then became 'Bulwer-Lytton'. His widowed mother had done the same in 1811. His brothers were always simply surnamed 'Bulwer'.
He was the youngest son of General William Earle Bulwer of Heydon Hall and Wood Dalling, Norfolk and Elizabeth Barbara Lytton, daughter of Richard Warburton Lytton of Knebworth, Hertfordshire. He had two brothers, William Earle Lytton Bulwer (1799–1877) and Henry, afterwards Lord Dalling and Bulwer.
Lord Lytton's original surname was Bulwer, the names 'Earle' and 'Lytton' were middle names. On 20 February 1844 he assumed the name and arms of Lytton by royal licence and his surname then became 'Bulwer-Lytton'. His widowed mother had done the same in 1811. His brothers were always simply surnamed 'Bulwer'.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 4, 2021
A best-selling author in his day, second only to Dickens in the 1850s, Edward Bulwer-Lytton has now descended into a near-complete oblivion—worse, he is remembered solely as a stylistic bogeyman, the epitome of florid and turgid prose. I’m glad that serendipity led me to sample his ambitious, eccentric 1832 novel Eugene Aram. I found it far more interesting—and more readable—than anything had led me to suppose.
The early date is an important clue as to what to expect. Eugene Aram is not a fully-fledged Victorian realist novel, but more of a late-Romantic philosophical fable, with influences from earlier classical and medieval genres like pastoral and romance. The introduction to the fine 2010 scholarly edition in which I read it (from Valancourt Books) identifies Bulwer’s main intertexts as Hamlet, Don Quijote, Tristram Shandy, and Goethe’s Faust. Bulwer himself throws a few more into the mix, in the text itself, and in his introductions to the various editions, notably Spenser, Ariosto, Walter Scott, and—especially intriguing for me—William Godwin’s 1794 politically radical fable of crime and punishment, Caleb Williams, which it does indeed resemble at points.
Unlike Caleb Williams, Eugene Aram is based on a real-life story, dating to the 1750s, which was well known to Bulwer’s original readership. I knew it myself, having encountered various allusions to it in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife, which I read a few months ago, but I’d recommend anyone thinking of reading this novel to embark on it without knowing the story, as I imagine it would be enhanced by the element of suspense. Aram’s is a fascinating and troubling tale—a true case of life being stranger than fiction—and it’s not hard to see why novelists might be drawn to it. (According to Bulwer’s introduction to the 1840 edition, Godwin had planned a novel on the same subject himself.)
The principal focus of the novel, drawing in all around it like a vortex, is the extraordinary character of Aram himself, a much-enhanced version of the true, historical figure. Bulwer paints him as a hermit-like, brooding, melancholic intellectual, kin to the wizards of romance, who is incongruously drawn into the world of the realist novel, when he is befriended by the local squire and falls in love with one of his daughters. A counterweight is offered by the squire’s nephew, Walter Lester, love rival to Aram, who embarks on a Grail-like quest for the traces of his lost, wastrel father. The two plots inexorably coincide, with tragic consequences for both men, in a way that can be read as the workings of a dark, star-driven providence or a stern moral logic, or both.
So much for the plot, but in this highly episodic and quite leisurely novel, a lot of the pleasure lies along the way, particularly in the various debates among the characters (or within the characters, in the case of Aram’s troubled monologues), which make of the novel a work of moral and political philosophy as much as a narrative fiction. I found Bulwer’s equivocal treatment of Aram’s political radicalism especially interesting. He has some great speeches on the psychological and moral consequences of poverty and social inequality, reminiscent of Caleb Williams, yet the plot casts a veil of retrospective ambiguity over his motives. A prominent politician, as well as a novelist, Bulwer started his career as a Whig and ended it as a Conservative. There’s a shadow of that transition in this work.
Finally, what of Bulwer’s notorious style? His main remaining claim to fame is having penned the—supposedly—quintessential bad opening sentence (in his 1830 novel Paul Clifford), beginning ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ In the words of the editor of the Valancourt edition, Ann-Barbara Graff, this ‘is regarded as the definitive example of purple prose, as it seems clichéd and cloying, overwritten and overwrought’. The Bulwer-Lytton prize was set up in his honour in 1982, awarded for the most atrocious opening line to a hypothetical novel.
Graff doesn’t attempt to defend Bulwer on this score, arguing rather that the interest of his subject-matter outweighs his deficiencies of style. I felt this was rather unfair. Bulwer’s prose is predictably florid and digressive by modern standards, but not by the standards of the day (compared, for example, with Scott). It’s also not without moments of felicity, and I certainly wouldn’t call it turgid or inept. It is a genuine pity that Bulwer’s ill-deserved reputation has so utterly expunged him from the nineteenth-century canon. At the time of writing, Eugene Aram has thirteen ratings and two text reviews on Goodreads.
The early date is an important clue as to what to expect. Eugene Aram is not a fully-fledged Victorian realist novel, but more of a late-Romantic philosophical fable, with influences from earlier classical and medieval genres like pastoral and romance. The introduction to the fine 2010 scholarly edition in which I read it (from Valancourt Books) identifies Bulwer’s main intertexts as Hamlet, Don Quijote, Tristram Shandy, and Goethe’s Faust. Bulwer himself throws a few more into the mix, in the text itself, and in his introductions to the various editions, notably Spenser, Ariosto, Walter Scott, and—especially intriguing for me—William Godwin’s 1794 politically radical fable of crime and punishment, Caleb Williams, which it does indeed resemble at points.
Unlike Caleb Williams, Eugene Aram is based on a real-life story, dating to the 1750s, which was well known to Bulwer’s original readership. I knew it myself, having encountered various allusions to it in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife, which I read a few months ago, but I’d recommend anyone thinking of reading this novel to embark on it without knowing the story, as I imagine it would be enhanced by the element of suspense. Aram’s is a fascinating and troubling tale—a true case of life being stranger than fiction—and it’s not hard to see why novelists might be drawn to it. (According to Bulwer’s introduction to the 1840 edition, Godwin had planned a novel on the same subject himself.)
The principal focus of the novel, drawing in all around it like a vortex, is the extraordinary character of Aram himself, a much-enhanced version of the true, historical figure. Bulwer paints him as a hermit-like, brooding, melancholic intellectual, kin to the wizards of romance, who is incongruously drawn into the world of the realist novel, when he is befriended by the local squire and falls in love with one of his daughters. A counterweight is offered by the squire’s nephew, Walter Lester, love rival to Aram, who embarks on a Grail-like quest for the traces of his lost, wastrel father. The two plots inexorably coincide, with tragic consequences for both men, in a way that can be read as the workings of a dark, star-driven providence or a stern moral logic, or both.
So much for the plot, but in this highly episodic and quite leisurely novel, a lot of the pleasure lies along the way, particularly in the various debates among the characters (or within the characters, in the case of Aram’s troubled monologues), which make of the novel a work of moral and political philosophy as much as a narrative fiction. I found Bulwer’s equivocal treatment of Aram’s political radicalism especially interesting. He has some great speeches on the psychological and moral consequences of poverty and social inequality, reminiscent of Caleb Williams, yet the plot casts a veil of retrospective ambiguity over his motives. A prominent politician, as well as a novelist, Bulwer started his career as a Whig and ended it as a Conservative. There’s a shadow of that transition in this work.
Finally, what of Bulwer’s notorious style? His main remaining claim to fame is having penned the—supposedly—quintessential bad opening sentence (in his 1830 novel Paul Clifford), beginning ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ In the words of the editor of the Valancourt edition, Ann-Barbara Graff, this ‘is regarded as the definitive example of purple prose, as it seems clichéd and cloying, overwritten and overwrought’. The Bulwer-Lytton prize was set up in his honour in 1982, awarded for the most atrocious opening line to a hypothetical novel.
Graff doesn’t attempt to defend Bulwer on this score, arguing rather that the interest of his subject-matter outweighs his deficiencies of style. I felt this was rather unfair. Bulwer’s prose is predictably florid and digressive by modern standards, but not by the standards of the day (compared, for example, with Scott). It’s also not without moments of felicity, and I certainly wouldn’t call it turgid or inept. It is a genuine pity that Bulwer’s ill-deserved reputation has so utterly expunged him from the nineteenth-century canon. At the time of writing, Eugene Aram has thirteen ratings and two text reviews on Goodreads.
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April 21, 2017Still deciding on a star rating so I'll be back with that soon.
As a word of friendly warning, I should note that Bulwer-Lytton's style of writing has been labeled as "florid," "turgid," and one of my online friends referred to it as the "paid-by-the-word" style -- in short, he's extremely verbose, a yammerer extraordinaire, and devoted to wordiness to the point where bits of this novel can be a chore. I consider myself to be a very patient reader but I almost lost my cool after reading six pages devoted to absolutely nothing but one man trying to convince another to look after his cat while he was off on his travels. I knew this was going to be rough going pretty much at the outset.
However, in spite of the extreme verbosity, Eugene Aram turns out to be a pretty decent book, a tale very loosely based on the real-life story of the titular character, a real-life murderer. It is an example of what is known as a "Newgate novel," which as a general rule, "focused on the lives of real or invented criminals," and more relevant to my purposes, are of huge importance to the history of crime fiction.
Divided into three volumes, the first few chapters of Eugene Aram introduce us to the main characters of this book, and situate us somewhere in the English countryside, in the village of Grassdale. The backstory to what is to come is also introduced, concerning the disappearance of one Geoffrey Lester, brother to squire Rowland Lester and father of Walter Lester. Geoffrey had married a woman with a "competent and respectable fortune," stayed with her a few years even though the marriage wasn't a good one, and then just took off leaving young Walter behind to grow up in the home of his uncle Rowland. Every effort had been made to find Geoffrey, but to no avail.
As he grew older, Walter fell for his cousin Madeline, but she only has eyes for the mild, reclusive scholar who lives nearby, Eugene Aram. With the handwriting on the wall regarding that relationship, and with no love lost between Walter and Aram, Walter decides it's time he goes out into the world. While he's out there, he plans to seek news of his long-lost father. As we're told,
"The deep mystery that for so many years had hung over the fate of his parent, it might indeed be his lot to pierce; and with a common waywardness in our nature, the restless son felt his interest in that parent the livelier from the very circumstance of remembering nothing of his person."
Off he goes and it isn't too long after he begins his quest that he finds the first clue having to do with his missing father; following that up sends him on to yet another place and so on until he is ready to return to Grassdale, as it just so happens, on the day set for the marriage between Madeline and Eugene Aram. But the wedding plans are off after Walter reveals everything he's learned over the course of his travels -- as the back-cover of my copy reveals, Walter's quest will "lead to the discovery of a long-hidden and horrible crime and the trial of Eugene Aram for murder!"
It takes a very patient reader to make it through this book, but it's worth it for many reasons, none the least of which is that it is a part of crime-fiction history. When earlier I posted my thoughts on Richmond: Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner, Drawn Up from His Private Memoranda, I said that "it's a narrow circle of readers who will be attracted to this book, making it what I call an "NFE" read -- not for everyone..." and I will say that the circle of people who would be attracted by Eugene Aram is probably even narrower. I would, however, certainly recommend it to readers who are interested in the evolution of crime fiction, and for those readers who are interested in pre-Victorian British fiction as well.
more here:
http://www.crimesegments.com/2017/04/...
As a word of friendly warning, I should note that Bulwer-Lytton's style of writing has been labeled as "florid," "turgid," and one of my online friends referred to it as the "paid-by-the-word" style -- in short, he's extremely verbose, a yammerer extraordinaire, and devoted to wordiness to the point where bits of this novel can be a chore. I consider myself to be a very patient reader but I almost lost my cool after reading six pages devoted to absolutely nothing but one man trying to convince another to look after his cat while he was off on his travels. I knew this was going to be rough going pretty much at the outset.
However, in spite of the extreme verbosity, Eugene Aram turns out to be a pretty decent book, a tale very loosely based on the real-life story of the titular character, a real-life murderer. It is an example of what is known as a "Newgate novel," which as a general rule, "focused on the lives of real or invented criminals," and more relevant to my purposes, are of huge importance to the history of crime fiction.
Divided into three volumes, the first few chapters of Eugene Aram introduce us to the main characters of this book, and situate us somewhere in the English countryside, in the village of Grassdale. The backstory to what is to come is also introduced, concerning the disappearance of one Geoffrey Lester, brother to squire Rowland Lester and father of Walter Lester. Geoffrey had married a woman with a "competent and respectable fortune," stayed with her a few years even though the marriage wasn't a good one, and then just took off leaving young Walter behind to grow up in the home of his uncle Rowland. Every effort had been made to find Geoffrey, but to no avail.
As he grew older, Walter fell for his cousin Madeline, but she only has eyes for the mild, reclusive scholar who lives nearby, Eugene Aram. With the handwriting on the wall regarding that relationship, and with no love lost between Walter and Aram, Walter decides it's time he goes out into the world. While he's out there, he plans to seek news of his long-lost father. As we're told,
"The deep mystery that for so many years had hung over the fate of his parent, it might indeed be his lot to pierce; and with a common waywardness in our nature, the restless son felt his interest in that parent the livelier from the very circumstance of remembering nothing of his person."
Off he goes and it isn't too long after he begins his quest that he finds the first clue having to do with his missing father; following that up sends him on to yet another place and so on until he is ready to return to Grassdale, as it just so happens, on the day set for the marriage between Madeline and Eugene Aram. But the wedding plans are off after Walter reveals everything he's learned over the course of his travels -- as the back-cover of my copy reveals, Walter's quest will "lead to the discovery of a long-hidden and horrible crime and the trial of Eugene Aram for murder!"
It takes a very patient reader to make it through this book, but it's worth it for many reasons, none the least of which is that it is a part of crime-fiction history. When earlier I posted my thoughts on Richmond: Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner, Drawn Up from His Private Memoranda, I said that "it's a narrow circle of readers who will be attracted to this book, making it what I call an "NFE" read -- not for everyone..." and I will say that the circle of people who would be attracted by Eugene Aram is probably even narrower. I would, however, certainly recommend it to readers who are interested in the evolution of crime fiction, and for those readers who are interested in pre-Victorian British fiction as well.
more here:
http://www.crimesegments.com/2017/04/...
April 1, 2021
The dedication from this somewhat forgotten author is to Sir Walter Scott, himself wildly popular in his day but I suspect little-read now.
This is typical Bulwer-Lytton - very flowery style, a good sense of history but to my mind with characters that fail to convince or win your affection.
Interesting to me, as the action takes place only a few miles from where I am typing this review, and this local angle certainly enhanced my perception of the book.
I am not sure I would urge anyone to read this author in preference to, say, George Eliot. If you want to read something by Bulwer-Lytton then Harold-The Last Of The Saxon Kings is, to my mind, a better bet.
This is typical Bulwer-Lytton - very flowery style, a good sense of history but to my mind with characters that fail to convince or win your affection.
Interesting to me, as the action takes place only a few miles from where I am typing this review, and this local angle certainly enhanced my perception of the book.
I am not sure I would urge anyone to read this author in preference to, say, George Eliot. If you want to read something by Bulwer-Lytton then Harold-The Last Of The Saxon Kings is, to my mind, a better bet.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews