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The World's Greatest Books — Volume 06 — Fiction by Various
page 109 of 428 (25%)

EDWARD BULWER LYTTON


Eugene Aram


Novelist, poet, essayist, and politician, Edward Bulwer Lytton
was born in London on May 25, 1805. His father was General
Earle Bulwer. He assumed his mother's family name on her death
in 1843, and was elevated to the peerage as Baron Lytton in
1866. At seventeen Lytton published a volume entitled,
"Ismael, and Other Poems." An unhappy marriage in 1827 was
followed by extraordinary literary activity, and during the
next ten years he produced twelve novels, two poems, a play,
"England and the English," and "Athens: Its Rise and Fall,"
besides an enormous number of shorter stories, essays, and
articles for contemporary periodicals. Altogether his output
is represented by nearly sixty volumes. Few books on their
publication have created a greater furore than Lord Lytton's
"Eugene Aram," which was published in 1832. One section of the
novel-reading public hailed its moving, dramatic story with
manifest delight, while the other severely condemned it on the
plea of its false morality. The story takes its title from
that remarkable scholar and criminal, Eugene Aram, at one time
a tutor in the Lytton family, who was executed at York in
1759, for a murder committed fourteen years before. The crime
caused much consternation at the time, Aram's refined and mild
disposition being apparently in direct contradiction to his
real nature. The novel is an unusually successful, though
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