Night and Morning. A Novel was created by Edward Bulwer Lytton. Edward George Earle Bulwer Lytton, 1st Baron of Knebworth (1803-1873) was a popular, productive, and influential writer for over forty years.

Philip Beaufort is the nephew of a rich but sour man who disapproves of marrying beneath one's class but winks at minor peccadillos like supporting mistresses. So Philip does not dare reveal to his uncle that he is in love with Catherine Morton, the daughter of a tradesman. She has just turned sixteen, but she loves him, so they marry in haste with only one witness. Philip then puts her up in a cottage in a rural town and has her represent herself to the world by her maiden name, even after she bears him two sons, Philip and Sydney, and carries the shame of being an unwed mother. Philip asks this of her because his uncle is not long for the world, and once he dies Philip will inherit his money and then reveal to the world that Catherine is his legal wife. Unfortunately, Philip dies in a horse riding accident after his uncle dies but before he can claim his title, and no proof of the marriage can be discovered: the parson who married them is dead, the church register has disappeared, and the sole witness to the wedding has moved to Australia. The rest of Night and Morning is the decades-long struggle of Philip, Jr. to prove his parents’ marriage, for Catherine becomes a social outcast after Philip, Sr.'s death and eventually dies hungry, and to find happiness for himself and for Sidney, from whom he is separated twice, once for a space of a few months and then later for nearly two decades.

Night and Morning is an uneven book. It is hampered by Bulwer Lytton's style, which is heavy-handed, reliant on narrative moralizing and pontificating, and full of convoluted writing. Edgar Allan Poe was harsh but fair when he wrote, of Night and Morning, that Bulwer Lytton’s “mere English is grossly defective–turgid, involved, and ungrammatical. There is scarcely a page of Night and Morning upon which a school boy could not detect at least half a dozen instances of faulty construction.”¹ Night and Morning is over-stuffed with plot twists, overflowing with incident and story intricacies. The flaws and virtues of the characters are often exaggerated, so that Catherine is saintly and the villains of the novel cartoonishly vile. And Bulwer Lytton indulges his tendency toward melodramatic straining for affect to the utmost.

But the novel, while not particularly good, is not boring. The melodrama yanks at the heartstrings–but in an agreeable fashion. The characterization is unsubtle, but after a while the reader starts to identify with the characters and sympathize with them. Bulwer Lytton successfully follows a simple formula for a writer’s success: make your characters flawed but with good hearts and heap injustices on their heads, and the readers will love you for it. Bulwer Lytton occasionally brings in the smart exchanges and witty one-liners and aphorisms of his Silver Fork novels. One of the characters, Lord Lilburne, is sardonic, highly intelligent, rotten to the core of his black heart, addicted to physical pleasures, enjoys hurting the feelings of others, and generally good company for the reader, if not the other characters. He is too evil to be a charming scoundrel, so a better description is “entertaining villain.” And while the story is more than a little complex, Bulwer Lytton plays fair with the readers; he brings in several surprises and numerous plot twists, but the reader can never say that the complications are unwarranted or unrealistic. ("Unrealistic" in the context of the time, of course. Night and Morning has secret compartments, rooftop chases, and men dying nobly of consumption, but they are not hard to believe in the context of the novel).

Night and Morning also has the character of Favart. M. Favart is “a little, thin, neatly dressed"² man who is “one of the most renowned chiefs of the great Parisian police, a man worthy to be the contemporary of the illustrious Vidocq.”³ Favart has a soft, mild voice which belies his fearless personality. He is a former counterfeiter, a faux monnoyer, who like Vidocq reformed and joined the police force. Because of that, perhaps, he has no fear of thieves and murderers and in fact “awed them with his very eye,”⁴ but he has also “been known to have been kicked downstairs by his wife, and when he was drawn into the grand army, he deserted on the eve of his first battle.”⁵ But as a policeman his “most vigilant acuteness” and his “most indefatigable research”⁶ are assets to his success. In Night and Morning he prevents a rich woman from marrying a swindler who is posing as a Polish emigre. Later Favart enters a den of counterfeiters in disguise in order to trap and arrest them. Unfortunately, the leader of the gang, Philip Beaufort's friend Gawtrey, recognizes Favart and strangles him.

Night and Morning was published in 1841, and Edgar Allan Poe’s review of it appeared in the April, 1841 issue of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, the same issue in which appeared Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe’s first Dupin story (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries). It is unlikely that Poe read Night and Morning before composing “Rue Morgue.” But Poe’s review of Night and Morning makes it clear that he was struck by two things after finishing it: Bulwer Lytton’s fitting of the tone of the story to “the fluctuations of his narrative,”⁷ and Bulwer Lytton’s command of plot, what Poe calls “that in which no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole.”⁸ Nearly everyone and everything in Night and Morning is related in some way to Philip Beaufort’s story, so that even minor characters have their part to play and are at least briefly important. This precision of plotting could not have influenced the writing of “Rue Morgue,” but it is possible—likely, even—that it did affect the manner in which Poe wrote the latter two Dupin stories, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter.”

Night and Morning has occasionally been called by critics the first detective novel in English. This is a reach. Favart only appears for a few pages, and Night and Morning is more properly a Proto-Mystery influenced by the Newgate novels (see: Proto-Mysteries). Favart is clearly an imitation of Eugène François Vidocq (see: Great Detective) but Favart is not so much a Great Detective as he is an early example of a police detective character. Favart is an honest cop, as well, which distinguishes him from Vidocq and places Favart as a predecessor to Dickens’ Inspector Bucket (see: Bleak House) and Wilkie Collins’ Sergeant Cuff (see: The Woman in White). Both Dickens and Collins were at least aware of Night and Morning, if not consciously influenced by the figure of M. Favart. (This would not be the last time that Dickens was influenced by Bulwer Lytton; Robert Beaufort is a likely model for Pecksniff, from Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit [1842-1844]—at least, Bulwer Lytton thought and wrote as much in the Preface to Night and Morning⁹ ).

Bulwer Lytton effectively formed the link between William Godwin’s 1794 novel Caleb Williams, whose titular character is widely regarded as the first fictional detective (albeit amateur), and the sensation novelists of the 1860s, such as Wilkie Collins, who wrote The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), later classified as mystery and detective fiction, respectively.¹⁰

Print: Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton, Night and Morning. Nashville, TN: Rarebooksclub.com, 2012.

¹ Edgar Allan Poe, “Night and Morning. A Novel,” Graham’s Magazine, Apr. 1841, in Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984), 156.

² Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton, Night and Morning (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), 295.

³ Lytton, Night and Morning, 296.

⁴ Lytton, Night and Morning, 317.

⁵ Lytton, Night and Morning, 317.

⁶ Lytton, Night and Morning, 317.

⁷ Poe, “Night and Morning,” 156.

⁸ Poe, “Night and Morning,” 148.

⁹ Bulwer Lytton, Night and Morning, xviii.

¹⁰ Lucy Sussex, “Edward Bulwer Lytton and the Development of the English Crime Novel,” Clues 26, no. 1 (2007): 8.