The great-great-great grandson of the much-maligned author Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton is to take part in a debate to defend his ancestor's writing. The Honourable Henry Lytton Cobbold, of Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, is travelling to Bulwer-Lytton's namesake, the town of Lytton in Canada, to take on the founder of the International Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, Professor Scott Rice.
Bulwer-Lytton has been ridiculed by the contest since 1982, when Rice came up with the idea for a competition to compose the opening sentence to the worst possible novel, inspired by Bulwer-Lytton's notorious "It was a dark and stormy night". The Great Bulwer Lytton Debate will take place in Lytton, British Columbia on August 30, and will see Scott attempt to show why the opening line is a "literary tragedy".
"I come to bury Lytton, not to praise him," said Rice. "The evil that men do lives after them, in Lytton's case in 27 novels whose perfervid turgidity I intend to expose, denude, and generally make visible."
"I'm off to defend his honour," Lytton Cobbold said. "Bulwer-Lytton was a remarkable man and it's rather unfair that Professor Rice decided to name the competition after him for entirely the wrong reasons. He was a great champion of the arts, and made such a huge difference to people in all walks of life…he was politician, writer, playwright and philosopher.
Defending Bulwer-Lytton's "dark and stormy night", Lytton Cobbold said he believed that "to have been the first person to have penned a cliché was a mark of genius". He said that Bulwer-Lytton invented a raft of sayings we still use today, including "the pen is mightier than the sword", "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar".
"He also left us Knebworth House, which is no bad thing," he added. "And I think the community in the town of Lytton is going to be more inclined to support me [than Scott]; Bulwer-Lytton made them quite happy – it's partly because of him that they didn't end up being part of America."
In a letter yesterday to Canada's Globe and Mail, Lytton's mayor Chris O'Connor said the town of Lytton had had enough. "For years, Professor Rice has been making sport of Lord Edward George Bulwer Lytton, with his Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Lord Lytton was both a statesman and an author. As colonial secretary, he helped create the Crown Colony of British Columbia in 1858."
O'Connor said he expected Lytton to be vindicated in the debate. "As he wrote, 'One of the sublimest things in the world is the plain truth'," he said, adding: "It won't be a 'dark and stormy night'; the debate is at 3pm."
The truncated version of the first line of Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford does not, perhaps, do justice to the full glory of the entire line: "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."
This year's contest was won last week by 41-year-old communications director Garrison Spik, from Washington DC, for the line: "Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, NJ.'"