Edward Bulwer-Lytton's ideational evolution: He pulls Disraeli left, then Disraeli pulls him right
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who hated to have fun poked at him, has been the subject of jokes and satire for almost 200 years. A prolific novelist in the 19 th century whose sales challenged those of his friend Charles Dickens and who was also a member of Parliament and served as Colonial Secretary, he is mostly forgotten today. Everywhere, that is, except this blog, where he has made repeated appearances , and the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a bad writing competition named for him because he once started a novel with the infamous words “It was a dark and stormy night.” The contest ran for 42 years until last year, when it closed because it took too much work to administer . The famous line has more than once been cited in a “Jeopardy!” question and made immortal by Snoopy, who recurrently begins his own writing attempts with that opening. In his own day, some of the fun poked at Bulwer-Lytton came after he extended his already overlong name from Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer to Edw...