Project Gutenberg's Paul Clifford, Complete, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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Title: Paul Clifford, Complete

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Release Date: March 16, 2009 [EBook #7735]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAUL CLIFFORD, COMPLETE ***

Produced by Bryan Sherman and David Widger

PAUL CLIFFORD

By Edward Bulwer-Lytton

PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1840.

This novel so far differs from the other fictions by the same author
that it seeks to draw its interest rather from practical than ideal
sources. Out of some twelve Novels or Romances, embracing, however
inadequately, a great variety of scene and character,--from "Pelham"
to the "Pilgrims of the Rhine," from "Rienzi" to the "Last Days of
Pompeii,"--"Paul Clifford" is the only one in which a robber has been
made the hero, or the peculiar phases of life which he illustrates have
been brought into any prominent description.

Without pausing to inquire what realm of manners or what order of crime
and sorrow is open to art, and capable of administering to the proper
ends of fiction, I may be permitted to observe that the present subject
was selected, and the Novel written, with a twofold object: First,
to draw attention to two errors in our penal institutions; namely, a
vicious prison-discipline, and a sanguinary criminal code,--the habit of
corrupting the boy by the very punishment that ought to redeem him,
and then hanging the man at the first occasion, as the easiest way of
getting rid of our own blunders. Between the example of crime which the
tyro learns from the felons in the prison-yard, and the horrible
levity with which the mob gather round the drop at Newgate, there is a
connection which a writer may be pardoned for quitting loftier regions
of imagination to trace and to detect. So far this book is less
a picture of the king's highway than the law's royal road to the
gallows,--a satire on the short cut established between the House of
Correction and the Condemned Cell. A second and a lighter object in the
novel of "Paul Clifford" (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque
or travesty in the earlier chapters) was to show t