Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Description

Paul Clifford opens with the most famous stormy night in English literature and a hero who will not stay respectable. Orphaned young, raised by a villainous fast-talking fencing-master, Paul is swept into a gang of mounted robbers while hardening, Robert Burns-style, into “a great reader of novels and romances.” The joke is that Bulwer-Lytton is building a tender, careless young man out of heroic cliches and then asking the reader to forgive him. The larger point is a serious one: in a country that hangs men for stealing a sheep, Bulwer asks, which class is truly the criminal one?

Because the book was published in the year of reform agitation, its scenes of the Old Bailey, of Newgate, of the gallows and the treadmill landed with real force. The elegant highwayman converses like a gentleman, while the gentlemen he robs behave like thieves at law. What made Paul Clifford a scandalous success in 1830 is still what makes it beguiling: the sheer energy with which a love story is smuggled inside a polemic.

The hero’s courtship of Lucy Brandon, conducted between exploits on the road, carries the warmth the satire needs, and the courtroom finale turns the whole book’s argument into a blazing finale. Few Victorians wrote with Bulwer’s blend of theatricality, learning, and nerve, and Paul Clifford shows all three at full strength.

Why readers pick it up

• One of the great villains-as-anti-heroes, decades before such figures became commonplace.
• A sly attack on English criminal law disguised as a romp.
• The prose that gave the world the most-quoted opening line in Gothic parody.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition delivers the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation optimized for phone, tablet, and e-reader. The long, digressive Victorian chapters are set to keep your place through every twist and gallop.