Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Biography

London ushered Edward George Bulwer-Lytton into the world on 25 May 1803, and from that first breath he began crafting sentences as ornate as the city’s gas-lit streets. Novels poured from his pen—works that would later leap onto flickering screens as In the Name of Love (1925), and twice ignite visions of ancient catastrophe in The Last Days of Pompeii (1913 and 1959). Off the page, he shared his life with Rosina Doyle Wheeler, the sharp-witted novelist who became his wife. Nearly seven decades after his arrival, the curtain fell on 18 January 1873 in Torquay, Devon, where the sea took over the storytelling.