"Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton" by John McLenan for "Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization" (10 August 1861)

Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton

John McLenan

1861

11.4 cm. by 11.5 cm wide

Bulwer-Lytton's A Strange Story

Harper's Weekly 5 (10 August 1861): 497.

Scanned image and commentary by Philip V. Allingham.

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Commentary

Serialised in thirty-one weekly numbers in Dickens's All the Year Round in Great Britain (10 August 1861 to 8 March 1862) and in Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization (also 10 August through 8 March 1862), Bulwer-Lytton's novel is an odd combination of the Victorian Gothic, spiritualism, Eastern mysticism, the occult, the epistolary technique, and the scientific treatise. Nine parts appeared in the New York weekly without the benefit of illustration, possibly because the Civil War, whose coverage commenced with the assault on Fort Sumter on 27 April 1861, required additional space for illustration. Simultaneous publication in London and New York meant that Bulwer-Lytton could enjoy both British and American copyright protection.

Famous for his hugely popular historical potboiler The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Sir Edward G. D. 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: A Journal of Civilization and in Great Britain in Dickens's weekly journal 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 Harker, owes much to Bulwer's rationalist narrator, Dr. Allen Fenwick, in the 1861-1862 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, 10 August — 21 December 1861.

Bulwer Lytton, Edward (Lord Lytton). A Strange Story. The Works of Edward Bulwer Lytton, Vol. VII. New York: P. F. Collier, n. d. Pp. 7-242.

Created 21 November 2007

Last modified 20 June 2026