RARE “1st Baron Lytton" Edward Bulwer-Lytton Hand Signed Free Frank For Sale

Up for sale "1st Baron Lytton" Edward Bulwer-Lytton Hand Signed Free Frank. This docuemnt is affixed to a 5.5X9 Monogramed Card. 

ES-7376E

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, 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.