Caxtoniana
A Series of Essays on Life, Literature, and Manners

An 1863 collection of essays on morality, literary style, psychology, politics and readership by hugely popular Victorian novelist Bulwer Lytton.

Edward Bulwer Lytton (Author)

9781108072793, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 June 2011

334 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.9 cm, 0.43 kg

In 1849 Edward Bulwer Lytton published the popular novel The Caxtons, about an eccentric family who claimed descent from the printer William Caxton. Its hero, Pisistratus Caxton, was named as the author of two subsequent works, My Novel (1853) and What Will He Do With It? (1859), which were less successful. Bulwer Lytton was referring to those novels when he named this two-volume collection of literary and philosophical essays Caxtoniana, first published in 1863 and here reprinted from the 1864 edition. They were the result of his wide reading on scientific, philosophical and occult subjects which he made use of in several of his works, particularly the supernatural A Strange Story (1862). Many of the essays in Caxtoniana deal with morality and the artist, others with literary style, psychology, politics and readership. Lytton claimed that these subjects were expressed in the form of romance in the 'Caxton' novels.

22. Motive power
23. On certain principles of art in works of imagination
24. Posthumous reputation
25. On some authors in whose writings knowledge of the world is eminently displayed
26. Readers and writers
27. On the spirit of conservation
L'envoi.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]