Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity by Goldhill Simon

Author:Goldhill, Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781400840076
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Chapter 6

VIRGINS, LIONS, AND HONEST PLUCK

The Knebworth Apollo

Edward Bulwer Lytton was “not an easy man to like.”1 His lifelong friend Disraeli may have called Charles Greville the vainest man who had ever lived, but he added “and I don’t forget Cicero and Lytton.”2 To match Cicero as a byword for vanity—and Disraeli was well placed to draw up an all-time list of the vainest of the vain—takes some doing, especially in the eyes of a friend.3 Thackeray, no friend, more bluntly disdained him as the “Knebworth Apollo”4—“bloated with vanity, meanness and ostentatious exaltation of self”;5 Lockhart wrote to Scott when Pelham, Lytton’s silver-fork novel of 1828, was published, that the writer was “a Norfolk squire and horrid puppy. I have not read the book from disliking the author.”6 Kingsley dismissed him as “a self-sustained, self-glorifying hot house flunkey.”7 Rosina, his wife, separated from him, scandalously, partly because his womanizing, combined with his jealousy, had become intolerable; and she wrote a series of bitter novels with scarcely disguised portraits of Lytton and his family, which were scabrous enough for Lytton to attempt to get an injunction against her publishing (and his son to get an injunction against her biographer quoting from his father’s letters).8 He even tried to have her committed to a lunatic asylum, a ploy that failed in the face of rather too strong a public outcry. He was a publicly dislikeable celebrity.

The reviews of his writing, especially in the more high-minded journals, were often equally scathing, extreme even for the intense rhetoric of Victorian reviewing, especially as the century progressed. “It would be difficult to extract a dozen pages which show any real command over the English language,” opined the Westminster Review of his collected oeuvre in 1865, adding on his History of Athens, it is “a very bad history no doubt—flashy, superficial, pretentious.”9 “Tinselled truisms feature as new discoveries and obscurity of meaning passes for elevation of thought,” summarized The Athenaeum,10 and, as late as 1932, Queenie Leavis expressed her deep distaste for his “pseudo-philosophic nonsense and preposterous rhetoric.”11 Charles Kingsley, in politest mode, chipped in with criticism of Lytton’s “washy and somewhat insincere blague.”12

Yet not only was he hugely popular with readers—readers he snobbishly disdained as “the common herd,” by whom he felt “little understood, and superficially judged,”13 at least when his books were less successful than he hoped—he also received critical praise of the very highest order. Margaret Oliphant regarded him as “the first novelist of his time”14—surpassing Dickens and Thackeray—and in 1859 the Encyclopaedia Britannica declared him “now unquestionably the greatest living novelist.” He was lauded for precisely what the critics most hated in him, his philosophizing: “The volumes of Mr Bulwer are imbued with a deeper tone of philosophy . . . than those of his great contemporaries.”15 Ruskin captures the contrasts neatly. In 1836, when seventeen, he wrote in the full flush of youthful enthusiasm that an encounter with Bulwer Lytton’s writing “must always refine the mind to a great degree, and improve us in the science of metaphysics.

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