To an even greater extent than the other "metaphysical" novelists, he was apparently struggling to translate into prose fiction the sort of idealist and mythic vision that is associated with the major romantic poets. These struggles, as he thought of them, to save his and his readers' souls from the currently destructive, materialistic view of reality involved him, moreover, in a highly self-conscious and reflective kind of artistry. He wrote voluminously about the principles of his craft, so that he has come to be significant not only as a novelist but also as the chief theorist among the Victorian practitioners of fiction.
His serious loyalty to a conception of his ideal self and of his mission began to manifest itself in youth. The youngest and most interestingly precocious of three surviving sons, Edward Bulwer was the favorite of his independently rich mother, who encouraged him to believe he must become worthy of her aristocratic Lytton forebears. She taught him to dislike his irascible father, General Bulwer, who had failed to gain the peerage for which he had intrigued and who died when his youngest son was only four.
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