(born May 25, 1803, London, Eng.—died Jan. 18, 1873, Torquay, Devonshire) British politician, novelist, and poet. His first novel, Pelham, was published in 1828.
He entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1831, retired in 1841, and returned in 1852 as a Tory. In the interim he wrote his long historical novels, including The Last Days of Pompeii, 3 vol. (1834), and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848). He was created a peer in 1866. The opening to his 1830 novel Paul Clifford (“It was a dark and stormy night&elipsis;”) led to an annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Prize, in which entrants vie to create the most overwritten first sentence to a hypothetical novel.
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