“Secretary Of State For Colonies\" Edward Bulwer-Lytton Hand Signed 1X2 Card For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "1st Baron Lytton" Edward Bulwer-Lytton Hand Signed 1X2 Card. 

ES-4174E

Edward

George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, PC (25 May 1803 – 18 January 1873) was

an English writer and politician. He served as a Whig member

of Parliament from 1831 to 1841 and a Conservative from

1851 to 1866. He was Secretary of

State for the Colonies from June 1858 to June 1859,

choosing Richard Clement Moody as

founder of British Columbia. He declined the Crown of Greece in 1862

after King Otto abdicated.

He was created Baron Lytton of Knebworth in 1866. His marriage to the writer Rosina Bulwer Lytton broke

down. Her detention in an insane asylum provoked

a public outcry. Bulwer-Lytton's works sold and paid him well. He coined the

phrases "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than

the sword", and "dweller on the threshold",

and the opening phrase "It was a dark and stormy

night." Yet his standing declined and he is little read today.

The sardonic Bulwer-Lytton Fiction

Contest, held annually since 1982, claims to seek the "opening

sentence of the worst of all possible novels".  Bulwer was born on 25 May 1803 to General

William Earle Bulwer of Heydon Hall and Wood Dalling, Norfolk and Elizabeth Barbara Lytton,

daughter of Richard Warburton Lytton of Knebworth House, Hertfordshire. He had two older brothers,

William Earle Lytton Bulwer (1799–1877) and Henry (1801–1872),

later Lord Dalling and Bulwer. His father died and his

mother moved to London when he was four years old. When he was 15, a tutor

named Wallington, who tutored him at Ealing, encouraged him to publish an

immature work: Ishmael and Other Poems. Around this time, Bulwer

fell in love, but the woman's father induced her to marry another man. She died

about the time that Bulwer went to Cambridge and he stated that her loss

affected all his subsequent life.

In 1822 Bulwer-Lytton entered Trinity College, Cambridge,

where he met John Auldjo, but soon

moved to Trinity Hall. In 1825 he

won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for

English verse. In the following year he took his BA degree and printed for private circulation a small

volume of poems, Weeds and Wild Flowers. He purchased an army

commission in 1826, but sold it in 1829 without serving. In August 1827, he married Rosina Doyle Wheeler (1802–1882), a noted Irish beauty, but against the

wishes of his mother, who withdrew his allowance, forcing him to work for a

living. They had two children, Lady Emily Elizabeth

Bulwer-Lytton (1828–1848), and (Edward) Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831–1891) who became Governor-General and Viceroy of British India (1876–1880). His writing and political work strained

their marriage and his infidelity embittered Rosina. In 1833 they

separated acrimoniously and in 1836 the separation became legal. Three years

later, Rosina published Cheveley, or the Man of Honour (1839),

a near-libellous fiction satirising her husband's alleged hypocrisy. In

June 1858, when her husband was standing as parliamentary candidate for

Hertfordshire, she denounced him at the hustings. He retaliated by

threatening her publishers, withholding her allowance and denying her access to

their children. Finally he had her committed to a mental asylum,

but she was released a few weeks later after a public outcry. This she

chronicled in a memoir, A Blighted Life (1880). She continued attacking

her husband's character for several years.

The death of Bulwer's mother in 1843 meant his "exhaustion of toil and

study had been completed by great anxiety and grief," and by "about

the January of 1844, I was thoroughly shattered." In his mother's room at Knebworth House, which he inherited, he "had inscribed

above the mantelpiece a request that future generations preserve the room as

his beloved mother had used it." It remains hardly changed to this day. On 20 February 1844, in accordance with his

mother's will, he changed his surname from Bulwer to Bulwer-Lytton and assumed

the arms of Lytton by royal licence. His widowed mother had done the same in 1811.

His brothers remained plain "Bulwer". By chance Bulwer-Lytton

encountered a copy of "Captain Claridge's work

on the "Water Cure", as

practised by Priessnitz, at

Graefenberg", and "making allowances for certain exaggerations

therein", pondered the option of travelling to Graefenberg, but preferred

to find something closer to home, with access to his own doctors in case of

failure: "I who scarcely lived through a day without leech or

potion!". After reading a pamphlet by Doctor James

Wilson, who operated a hydropathic establishment with James Manby Gully at Malvern, he stayed there

for "some nine or ten weeks", after which he "continued the

system some seven weeks longer under Doctor Weiss, at Petersham", then again at "Doctor Schmidt's

magnificent hydropathic establishment at Boppart" (at the former

Marienberg Convent at Boppard), after developing a cold and

fever upon his return home.

When Otto, King of Greece abdicated

in 1862, Bulwer-Lytton was offered the Greek Crown, but declined. founded in 1867

by Robert Wentworth Little,

claimed Bulwer-Lytton as their "Grand Patron", but he wrote to the

society complaining that he was "extremely surprised" by their use of

the title, as he had "never sanctioned such." Nevertheless, a number of esoteric groups have

continued to claim Bulwer-Lytton as their own, chiefly because some of his

writings – such as the 1842 book Zanoni – have included Rosicrucian and other esoteric

notions. According to the Fulham Football Club, he

once resided in the original Craven Cottage, today the site of their stadium. Bulwer-Lytton

had long suffered from a disease of the ear, and for the last two or three

years of his life lived in Torquay nursing his health. After an operation to cure deafness, an abscess formed in the ear and burst; he endured

intense pain for a week and died at 2 am on 18 January 1873, just short of his

70th birthday. The cause of death was unclear but it was

thought the infection had affected his brain and caused a fit. Rosina outlived him by nine years. Against his

wishes, Bulwer-Lytton was honoured with a burial in Westminster Abbey.[20] His unfinished history Athens: Its

Rise and Fall was published posthumously.