He was educated at home and at a school near Twickenham; at the age of fourteen he was sent to Harrow, where he began to compose poetry. He was encouraged in his literary efforts by his father's friend John Forster, the influential critic and literary advisor to Dickens, Browning, Leigh Hunt, and others. Forster was to act not only as Lytton's editor but also as his guardian and confidant, and as a mediator between Robert and his aloof, sometimes tyrannical father.
In 1849 Lytton was sent to Bonn to study with an English tutor, but illness, debt, and his attempted suicide prompted his father to call him home. The next year he took up a post in Washington, D.C., as unpaid attaché to his uncle, Sir Henry Bulwer, the ambassador to the United States. It was his father's wish that Robert adopt a profession which would enable him to support himself and the vast family estate of Knebworth which he would someday inherit, but the demands of diplomacy were inimical to his aesthetic sensibility.
In February 1852 Lytton was transferred to Florence, where he mingled with the Anglo-American expatriate colony which included William Wetmore Story, Frederick Tennyson, George Seymour Kirkup, the Trollopes, and the Brownings.
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