While Bulwer-Lytton is generally credited with-or perhaps accused of-popularizing the phrase, “a dark and stormy night” was already a cliché when he got hold of it. "It was a dark and stormy night the rain fell in torrents-except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
#One stormy night book full#
Remarkably, those seven words only comprise about a sixth of Paul Clifford’s ambitious opening sentence, which in full reads, In 1848, Bulwer-Lytton called the novel “a loud cry to amend the circumstance” and “redeem the victim.” According to The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, Paul Clifford was “one of the most important novels of the 1830s.”īut since the book is remembered today only for its first seven words, all that context is mostly lost to history.
The book is largely devoted to highlighting the social circumstances that lead its hero to a life of crime, including a stint in prison after he’s falsely accused of picking pockets. (Unbeknownst to the robber, he’s actually the son of a famous judge.) According to his preface to an 1840 edition, Bulwer-Lytton wrote Paul Clifford partly to point out injustices in England’s penal system. “It was a dark and stormy night” opens Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, about a highway robber who, as part of a con, disguises himself as a gentleman. It’s an ironic legacy for a prolific author who influenced some of the most popular novels in English literature, helped invent sci-fi fandom, laid the groundwork for modern crime fiction, and accidentally sparked a movement for an important social reform. Bulwer-Lytton was once as widely read as his friend Charles Dickens, but today he’s remembered almost exclusively for one bad sentence. The phrase has become so ingrained in our literary culture that we rarely give much thought to its origin-and when he put pen to paper, it’s likely that author and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton had no idea just how infamous his dark and stormy night would become.
But if you want to start a novel badly, any cartoon beagle can tell you that there’s only one choice: “It was a dark and stormy night.” If you want to start a novel, your options for an opening line are just this side of infinite.
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