ABSTRACT
‘It was a dark and stormy night’ – as I choose to imagine it – the setting Knebworth, the Tudor-Gothic mansion and maternal ancestral seat of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who, as he passed the ‘yellow room’, glanced in, thinking he might glimpse the ghost of the ‘fair-haired boy’ whom he insisted haunted that room. 1 On the previous day while in London, Bulwer-Lytton had taken his seat in Parliament, where he had exchanged observations, both political and literary, with his friend Benjamin Disraeli, beside whom he would serve in Lord Derby’s government as Secretary of State for the Colonies. 2 Both he and Disraeli would be raised to the peerage and move to the House of Lords. He then had met briefly with one of his publishers, William Blackwood, about royalties. As the immensely popular author of The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and The Caxtons (1849), among other bestsellers, and as a man on his way to becoming ‘one of the most successful writers of the nineteenth century’ (at least financially), Bulwer-Lytton knew he could demand top dollar and get it. 3 On his way to join Charles Dickens for a midday repast, he had stepped into a rare bookshop specializing in occult literature, searching for a first edition of Johannes Andreae’s Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616). 4 He was conducting research for another occult romance novel, A Strange Story (1862). His earlier occult romance, Zanoni (1842), had become known as a ‘Rosicrucian novel’, and Bulwer-Lytton would later become, by induction, ‘a member of the Society of Rosicrucians and Grand Patron of the Order’. 5 Dickens, whom Bulwer-Lytton was meeting near the offices of All the Year Round, had invited Bulwer-Lytton to publish his next novel serially. Dickens would also consult him about the draft ending of his own novel-in-progress, Great Expectations, and dedicate that novel to Bulwer-Lytton. A Strange Story would appear in All the Year Round. He and Dickens had been joined for lunch by Chauncey Hare Townsend, whom Bulwer-Lytton had known since their school days at Ramsgate. Townsend had drawn both Bulwer-Lytton and Dickens toward mesmerism and spiritualism, and works of his, like Facts in Mesmerism (1840), were significant in legitimating mesmerism in the eyes of many Britons, as were the fictional and personal investigations of it by such notables as Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton. In the afternoon, Townsend and Bulwer-Lytton had called on Dr John Elliotson at the London Mesmeric Infirmary, which Elliotson had founded in 1849. There they observed ongoing experiments to test the efficacy of mesmeric medicine. Bulwer-Lytton had already defended Elliotson against the censure of the medical establishment. 6 He had previously urged Harriett Martineau to try mesmeric treatment, and Martineau then helped popularize the movement with her Letters on Mesmerism (1845). 7 In the evening, Bulwer-Lytton had met with Daniel Dunglas Home, one of the most famous spiritualist mediums of the century, as well as Madame Home, with whom Bulwer-Lytton later would correspond, at their lodgings for drinks. Bulwer-Lytton ‘offer[ed] Knebworth as a venue for his séances’. 8 Now, back at Knebworth, he was walking with a flickering Egyptian oil lamp in hand towards a darkened room in which his guests that evening had been prepared for his arrival. As part of the evening’s entertainment, he told their fortunes, having assumed the persona in which he called himself ‘Le Vieux Sorcier’. 9
