After a prolific life as an author with a European reputation, outselling Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton was ennobled and, on his death, buried in Westminster Abbey. Since the First World War, however, his literary reputation has sunk and he is now little read. Bulwer Lytton is the first modern biography of an extraordinary man whose literary output was prodigious. It ranged from novels, such as The Last Days of Pompeii, and poetry to plays, biographies and extensive political commentaries and journalism. A dandy to rival Disraeli, he lived life in London, at Knebworth, his country house, or more frequently abroad, with hectic intensity. Arousing strong emotions in public, his private life was turbulent in the extreme; his acrimonious and bitter divorce from his wife Rosina providing one of the most public and prolonged marital disputes of the period. Despite this, he became Secretary for the Colonies in 1858 and was responsible for the setting up of Queensland. Leslie Mitchell's biography, written to mark the two hundredth anniversary of Bulwer Lytton's birth, is an account of an eminent and very remarkable Victorian.

On the occasion of the bicentenary of Edward Bulwer Lytton's birth, seventeen scholars from five countries have contributed essays devoted to many aspects of his career. After the first essay that analyzes the reasons for Bulwer's extraordinary reputation in his own day, twelve of the essays focus primarily upon one or more of the novels, from Falkland (1827) to Kenelm Chillingly (1873). Other novels examined include Bulwer's The Last Days of Pompeii, The Coming Race, The Parisians, and the Caxton trilogy, as well as his Newgate novels. In the volume are also considerations of the seminal treatise England and the English (1833), the incomplete history of Athens (1837), and the achievement of Bulwer Lytton as Colonial Secretary (1858-59). Two essays, one written by a descendant of Bulwer, deal with the overshadowing disaster of his life, the marriage to Rosina Wheeler, herself a novelist whose novels sought to undermine his. Bulwer emerges from this collection of essays as a challengingly complex but coherent figure that merits the respect of contemporary students of the Victorian phenomenon.