This eBook was produced by Tapio Riikonen
and David Widger
by Edward Bulwer Lytton
"Lucretia; or, The Children of Night," was begun simultaneously with "TheCaxtons: a Family Picture." The two fictions were intended as pendants;both serving, amongst other collateral aims and objects, to show theinfluence of home education, of early circumstance and example, uponafter character and conduct. "Lucretia" was completed and publishedbefore "The Caxtons." The moral design of the first was misunderstoodand assailed; that of the last was generally acknowledged and approved:the moral design in both was nevertheless precisely the same. But in oneit was sought through the darker side of human nature; in the otherthrough the more sunny and cheerful: one shows the evil, the other thesalutary influences, of early circumstance and training. Necessarily,therefore, the first resorts to the tragic elements of awe and distress,—the second to the comic elements of humour and agreeable emotion. Thesedifferences serve to explain the different reception that awaited thetwo, and may teach us how little the real conception of an author isknown, and how little it is cared for; we judge, not by the purpose heconceives, but according as the impressions he effects are pleasurable orpainful. But while I cannot acquiesce in much of the hostile criticismthis fiction produced at its first appearance, I readily allow that as amere question of art the story might have been improved in itself, andrendered more acceptable to the reader, by diminishing the gloom of thecatastrophe. In this edition I have endeavoured to do so; and the victimwhose fate in the former cast of the work most revolted the reader, as aviolation of the trite but amiable law of Poetical Justice, is saved fromthe hands of the Children of Night. Perhaps, whatever the faults of thiswork, it equals most of its companions in the sustainment of interest,and in that coincidence between the gradual development of motive orpassion, and the sequences of external events constituting plot, whichmainly distinguish the physical awe of tragedy from the coarse horrors ofmelodrama. I trust at least that I shall now find few readers who willnot readily acknowledge that the delineation of crime has only beenemployed for the grave and impressive purpose which brings it within thedue province of the poet,—as an element of terror and a warning to theheart.
LONDON, December 7.
It is somewhere about four years since I appeared before the public asthe writer of a fiction, which I then intimated would probably be mylast; but bad habits are stronger than good intentions. When Fabricio,in his hospital, resolved upon abjuring the vocation of the Poet, he was,in truth, recommencing his desperate career by a Farewell to the Muses,—I need not apply the allusion.
I must own, however, that there had long been a desire in my mind totrace, in some work or other, the strange and secret ways through whichthat Arch-ruler of Civilization, familiarly called "Money," insinuatesitself into our thoughts and motives, our hearts and actions; affectingthose who undervalue as those who overestimate its importance; ruiningvirtues in the spendthrift no less than engendering vices in the miser.But when I half implied my farewell to the character of a novelist, I hadimagined that this conception might be best worked out upon the stage.After some unpublished and imperfect attempts towards so realizing mydesign, I found either that the subject was too wid