Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a Member of Parliament, briefly Colonial Secretary, and for a stretch of the nineteenth century among the best-paid novelists in England, which is not how he is remembered. Paul Clifford, from 1830, opens with the seven words that made him a joke a century later, and an annual competition for bad opening sentences now carries his name. The work itself ranges widely. The Last Days of Pompeii, from 1834, is the historical novel that fixed how the eruption is imagined; Zanoni and its earlier form Zicci are occult romances; Leila is set at the fall of Granada; and The Coming Race, from 1871, invents a people living underground and powered by a force called Vril, which puts it near the start of science fiction. He also gave English the pen being mightier than the sword, and the great unwashed. He lived from 1803 to 1873.