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Passage Illustrated: The First-person Narrator Threatened

Suddenly I felt my arm grasped; with his left hand (the right side was already lifeless) the dying man drew me towards him nearer and nearer, till his lips almost touched my ear, and, in a voice now firm, now splitting into gasp and hiss, thus he said, “I have summoned you to gaze on your own work! You have stricken down my life at the moment when it was most needed by my children, and most serviceable to mankind. Had I lived a few years longer, my children would have entered on manhood, safe from the temptations of want and undejected by the charity of strangers. Thanks to you, they will be penniless orphans. Fellow-creatures afflicted by maladies your pharmacopoeia had failed to reach came to me for relief, and they found it. "The effect of imagination," you say. What matters, if I directed the imagination to cure? Now you have mocked the unhappy ones out of their last chance of life. They will suffer and perish. Did you believe me in error? Still you knew that my object was research into truth. You employed against your brother in art venomous drugs and a poisoned probe. Look at me! Are you satisfied with your work?”

I sought to draw back and pluck my arm from the dying man’s grasp. I could not do so without using a force that would have been inhuman. His lips drew nearer still to my ear.

“Vain pretender, do not boast that you brought a genius for epigram to the service of science. . . . ." [Chapter II, 498]

Commentary

Famous for his 1834 historical potboiler The Last Days of Pompeii, Bulwer-Lytton in later life wrote the horror story The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain (1859). Another late popular Bulwer novel with a supernatural theme is A Strange Story (serialised separately in America in Harper's Weekly and in Britain in Dickens's All the Year Round, from 10 August 1861 to 8 March 1862), which influenced Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897). The latter novelist likewise presents the narrative in diaries, letters, and even news items. Stoker's focal character and narrator of the supernatural tale, Jonathan Hawker, owes much to Bulwer's narrator in the 1862 novel.

Bulwer's other late works include Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871), which again reflects the author's peculiar interest in the occult, and was an early example of the new genre of science fiction which developed out of the Sensation Novel.

Bibliography

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G. D. A Strange Story. Illustrated by John McLenan. Harper's Weekly V (Part 1: 10 August 1861), 498.

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Created 21 November 2007

Last updated 13 November 2021