Produced by Bryan Sherman and David Widger
PAUL CLIFFORD
By Edward Bulwer-Lytton
PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1840.
This novel so far differs from the other fictions by the same author
that it seeks to draw its interest rather from practical than ideal
sources. Out of some twelve Novels or Romances, embracing, however
inadequately, a great variety of scene and character,--from “Pelham”
to the “Pilgrims of the Rhine,” from “Rienzi” to the “Last Days of
Pompeii,”--“Paul Clifford” is the only one in which a robber has been
made the hero, or the peculiar phases of life which he illustrates have
been brought into any prominent description.
Without pausing to inquire what realm of manners or what order of crime
and sorrow is open to art, and capable of administering to the proper
ends of fiction, I may be permitted to observe that the present subject
was selected, and the Novel written, with a twofold object: First,
to draw attention to two errors in our penal institutions; namely, a
vicious prison-discipline, and a sanguinary criminal code,--the habit of
corrupting the boy by the very punishment that ought to redeem him,
and then hanging the man at the first occasion, as the easiest way of
getting rid of our own blunders. Between the example of crime which the
tyro learns from the felons in the prison-yard, and the horrible
levity with which the mob gather round the drop at Newgate, there is a
connection which a writer may be pardoned for quitting loftier regions
of imagination to trace and to detect. So far this book is less
a picture of the king's highway than the law's royal road to the
gallows,--a satire on the short cut established between the House of
Correction and the Condemned Cell. A second and a lighter object in the
novel of “Paul Clifford” (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque
or travesty in the earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing
essentially different between vulgar vice and fashionable vice, and that
the slang of the one circle is but an easy paraphrase of the cant of the
other.
The Supplementary Essays, entitled “Tomlinsoniana,” which contain
the corollaries to various problems suggested in the Novel, have been
restored to the present edition.
CLIFTON, July 25, 1840.
PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1848.
Most men who with some earnestness of mind examine into the mysteries of
our social state will perhaps pass through that stage of self-education
in which this Novel was composed. The contrast between conventional
frauds, received as component parts of the great system of civilization,
and the less deceptive invasions of the laws which discriminate the meum
from the tuum, is tempting to a satire that is not without its justice.
The tragic truths which lie hid in what I may call the Philosophy of
Circumstance strike through our philanthropy upon our imagination. We
see masses of our fellow-creatures the victims of circumstances over
which they had no control,--contaminated in infancy by the example of
parents, their intelligence either extinguished or turned against them,
according as the conscience is stifled in ignorance or perverted
to apologies for vice. A child who is cradled in ignominy,
whose schoolmaster is the felon, whose academy is the House of
Correction,--who breathes an atmosphere in which virtue is poisoned,
to which religion does not pierce,--becomes less a responsible and
reasoning human being than a wild beast which we suffer to range in
the wilderness, till it prowls near our homes, and we kill it in
self-defence.
In this respect the Novel of “Paul Clifford” is a loud cry to society
to amend the circumstance,--to redeem the victim. It is an appeal from
Humanity to Law. And in this, if it could not pretend to influence or
guide the temper of the times, it was at least a foresign of a coming
change. Between the literature of imagination, and the practical
interests of a people, there is a harmony as complete as it is
mysterious. The heart of an author is the mirror of his age. The shadow
of the sun is cast on the still surface of literature long before the
light penetrates to law; but it is ever from the sun that the shadow
falls, and the moment we see the shadow we may be certain of the light.
Since this work was written, society has been busy with the evils in
which it was then silently acquiescent. The true movement of the last
fifteen years has been the progress of one idea,--Social Reform. There
it advances with steady and noiseless march behind every louder question
of constitutional change. Let us do justice to our time. There have been
periods of more brilliant action on the destinies of States, but there
is no time visible in History in which there was so earnest and general
a desire to improve the condition of the great body of the people. In
every circle of the community that healthful desire is astir. It unites
in one object men of parties the most opposed; it affords the most
attractive nucleus for public meetings; it has cleansed the statute-book
from blood; it is ridding the world of the hangman. It animates the
clergy of all sects in the remotest districts; it sets the squire on
improving cottages and parcelling out allotments. Schools rise in every
village; in books the lightest, the Grand Idea colours the page, and
bequeaths the moral. The Government alone (despite the professions on
which the present Ministry was founded) remains unpenetrated by the
common genius of the age; but on that question, with all the subtleties
it involves, and the experiments it demands,--not indeed according to
the dreams of an insane philosophy, but according to the immutable laws
which proportion the rewards of labour to the respect for property,--a
Government must be formed at last.
There is in this work a subtler question suggested, but not
solved,--that question which perplexes us in the generous ardour of our
early youth,--which, unsatisfactory as all metaphysics, we rather escape
from than decide as we advance in years; namely, make what laws we
please, the man who lives within the pale can be as bad as the man
without. Compare the Paul Clifford of the fiction with the William
Brandon,--the hunted son with the honoured father, the outcast of the
law with the dispenser of the law, the felon with the judge; and as at
the last they front each other,--one on the seat of justice, the other
at the convict's bar,--who can lay his hand on his heart and say that
the Paul Clifford is a worse man than the William Brandon.
There is no immorality in a truth that enforces this question; for it
is precisely those offences which society cannot interfere with that
society requires fiction to expose. Society is right, though youth is
reluctant to acknowledge it. Society can form only certain regulations
necessary for its self-defence,--the fewer the better,--punish those who
invade, leave unquestioned those who respect them. But fiction follows
truth into all the strongholds of convention; strikes through the
disguise, lifts the mask, bares the heart, and leaves a moral wherever
it brands a falsehood.
Out of this range of ideas the mind of the Author has, perhaps, emerged
into an atmosphere which he believes to be more congenial to Art. But he
can no more regret that he has passed through it than he can regret that
while he dwelt there his heart, like his years, was young. Sympathy with
the suffering that seems most actual, indignation at the frauds which
seem most received as virtues, are the natural emotions of youth,
if earnest. More sensible afterwards of the prerogatives, as of the
elements, of Art, the Author, at least, seeks to escape where the man
may not, and look on the practical world through the serener one of the
ideal.
With the completion of this work closed an era in the writer's
self-education. From “Pelham” to “Paul Clifford” (four fictions, all
written at a very early age), the Author rather observes than imagines;
rather deals with the ordinary surface of human life than attempts,
however humbly, to soar above it or to dive beneath. From depicting
in “Paul Clifford” the errors of society, it was almost the natural
progress of reflection to pass to those which swell to crime in the
solitary human heart,--from the bold and open evils that spring
from ignorance and example, to track those that lie coiled in the
entanglements of refining knowledge and speculative pride. Looking back
at this distance of years, I can see as clearly as if mapped before
me, the paths which led across the boundary of invention from “Paul
Clifford” to “Eugene Aram.” And, that last work done, no less clearly
can I see where the first gleams from a fairer fancy broke upon my way,
and rested on those more ideal images which I sought with a feeble
hand to transfer to the “Pilgrims of the Rhine” and the “Last Days of
Pompeii.” We authors, like the Children in the Fable, track our journey
through the maze by the pebbles which we strew along the path. From
others who wander after us, they may attract no notice, or, if noticed,
seem to them but scattered by the caprice of chance; but we, when
our memory would retrace our steps, review in the humble stones the
witnesses of our progress, the landmarks of our way.
Kenelworth, 1848.
PAUL CLIFFORD.
CHAPTER I.
Say, ye oppressed by some fantastic woes,
Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose,
Who press the downy couch while slaves advance
With timid eye to read the distant glance,
Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease
To name the nameless, ever-new disease,
Who with mock patience dire complaints endure,
Which real pain and that alone can cure,
How would you bear in real pain to lie
Despised, neglected, left alone to die?
How would you bear to draw your latest breath
Where all that’s wretched paves the way to death?--Crabbe.
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at
occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind
which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies),
rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame
of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Through one of the
obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little loved by the
gentlemen of the police, a man, evidently of the lowest orders, was
wending his solitary way. He stopped twice or thrice at different shops
and houses of a description correspondent with the appearance of the
quartier in which they were situated, and tended inquiry for some
article or another which did not seem easily to be met with. All the
answers he received were couched in the negative; and as he turned from
each door he muttered to himself, in no very elegant phraseology, his
disappointment and discontent. At length, at one house, the landlord, a
sturdy butcher, after rendering the same reply the inquirer had hitherto
received, added, “But if this vill do as vell, Dummie, it is quite at
your sarvice!” Pausing reflectively for a moment, Dummie responded that
he thought the thing proffered might do as well; and thrusting it into
his ample pocket, he strode away with as rapid a motion as the wind and
the rain would allow. He soon came to a nest of low and dingy buildings,
at the entrance to which, in half-effaced characters, was written
“Thames Court.” Halting at the most conspicuous of these buildings, an
inn or alehouse, through the half-closed windows of which blazed out in
ruddy comfort the beams of the hospitable hearth, he knocked hastily at
the door. He was admitted by a lady of a certain age, and endowed with a
comely rotundity of face and person.
“Hast got it, Dummie?” said she, quickly, as she closed the door on the
guest.
“Noa, noa! not exactly; but I thinks as 'ow--”
“Pish, you fool!” cried the woman, interrupting him peevishly. “Vy,
it is no use desaving me. You knows you has only stepped from my
boosing-ken to another, and you has not been arter the book at all. So
there's the poor cretur a raving and a dying, and you--”
“Let I speak!” interrupted Dummie in his turn. “I tells you I vent
first to Mother Bussblone's, who, I knows, chops the whiners morning and
evening to the young ladies, and I axes there for a Bible; and she says,
says she, 'I' as only a “Companion to the Halter,” but you'll get a
Bible, I think, at Master Talkins', the cobbler as preaches.' So I
goes to Master Talkins, and he says, says he, 'I 'as no call for the
Bible,--'cause vy? I 'as a call vithout; but mayhap you'll be a getting
it at the butcher's hover the vay,--'cause vy? The butcher 'll be
damned!' So I goes hover the vay, and the butcher says, says he, 'I 'as
not a Bible, but I 'as a book of plays bound for all the vorld just like
'un, and mayhap the poor cretur may n't see the difference.' So I takes
the plays, Mrs. Margery, and here they be surely! And how's poor Judy?”
“Fearsome! she'll not be over the night, I'm a thinking.”
“Vell, I'll track up the dancers!”
So saying, Dummie ascended a doorless staircase, across the entrance
of which a blanket, stretched angularly from the wall to the chimney,
afforded a kind of screen; and presently he stood within a chamber which
the dark and painful genius of Crabbe might have delighted to portray.
The walls were whitewashed, and at sundry places strange figures and
grotesque characters had been traced by some mirthful inmate, in such
sable outline as the end of a smoked stick or the edge of a piece of
charcoal is wont to produce. The wan and flickering light afforded by a
farthing candle gave a sort of grimness and menace to these achievements
of pictorial art, especially as they more than once received
embellishments from portraits of Satan such as he is accustomed to be
drawn. A low fire burned gloomily in the sooty grate, and on the hob
hissed “the still small voice” of an iron kettle. On a round deal table
were two vials, a cracked cup, a broken spoon of some dull metal, and
upon two or three mutilated chairs were scattered various articles
of female attire. On another table, placed below a high, narrow,
shutterless casement (athwart which, instead of a curtain, a checked
apron had been loosely hung, and now waved fitfully to and fro in the
gusts of wind that made easy ingress through many a chink and cranny),
were a looking-glass, sundry appliances of the toilet, a box of coarse
rouge, a few ornaments of more show than value, and a watch, the regular
and calm click of which produced that indescribably painful feeling
which, we fear, many of our readers who have heard the sound in a
sick-chamber can easily recall. A large tester-bed stood opposite to
this table, and the looking-glass partially reflected curtains of
a faded stripe, and ever and anon (as the position of the sufferer
followed the restless emotion of a disordered mind) glimpses of the face
of one on whom Death was rapidly hastening. Beside this bed now stood
Dummie, a small, thin man dressed in a tattered plush jerkin, from
which the rain-drops slowly dripped, and with a thin, yellow, cunning
physiognomy grotesquely hideous in feature, but not positively villanous
in expression. On the other side of the bed stood a little boy of about
three years old, dressed as if belonging to the better classes, although
the garb was somewhat tattered and discoloured. The poor child trembled
violently, and evidently looked with a feeling of relief on the entrance
of Dummie. And now there slowly, and with many a phthisical sigh,
heaved towards the foot of the bed the heavy frame of the woman who had
accosted Dummie below, and had followed him, haud passibus aequis, to
the room of the sufferer; she stood with a bottle of medicine in her
hand, shaking its contents up and down, and with a kindly yet timid
compassion spread over a countenance crimsoned with habitual libations.
This made the scene,--save that on a chair by the bedside lay a
profusion of long, glossy, golden ringlets, which had been cut from
the head of the sufferer when the fever had begun to mount upwards, but
which, with a jealousy that portrayed the darling littleness of a vain
heart, she had seized and insisted on retaining near her; and save that,
by the fire, perfectly inattentive to the event about to take place
within the chamber, and to which we of the biped race attach so awful
an importance, lay a large gray cat, curled in a ball, and dozing
with half-shut eyes, and ears that now and then denoted, by a gentle
inflection, the jar of a louder or nearer sound than usual upon her
lethargic senses. The dying woman did not at first attend to the
entrance either of Dummie or the female at the foot of the bed, but she
turned herself round towards the child, and grasping his arm fiercely,
she drew him towards her, and gazed on his terrified features with a
look in which exhaustion and an exceeding wanness of complexion were
even horribly contrasted by the glare and energy of delirium.
“If you are like him,” she muttered, “I will strangle you,--I will! Ay,
tremble, you ought to tremble when your mother touches you, or when
he is mentioned. You have his eyes, you have! Out with them, out,--the
devil sits laughing in them! Oh, you weep, do you, little one? Well,
now, be still, my love; be hushed! I would not harm thee! Harm--O
God, he is my child after all!” And at these words she clasped the boy
passionately to her breast, and burst into tears.
“Coom, now, coom,” said Dummie, soothingly; “take the stuff, Judith, and
then ve'll talk over the hurchin!”
The mother relaxed her grasp of the boy, and turning towards the
speaker, gazed at him for some moments with a bewildered stare; at
length she appeared slowly to remember him, and said, as she raised
herself on one hand, and pointed the other towards him with an inquiring
gesture,--“Thou hast brought the book?”
Dummie answered by lifting up the book he had brought from the honest
butcher's.
“Clear the room, then,” said the sufferer, with that air of mock command
so common to the insane. “We would be alone!”
Dummie winked at the good woman at the foot of the bed; and she
(though generally no easy person to order or to persuade) left, without
reluctance, the sick chamber.
“If she be a going to pray,” murmured our landlady (for that office did
the good matron hold), “I may indeed as well take myself off, for it's
not werry comfortable like to those who be old to hear all that 'ere!”
With this pious reflection, the hostess of the Mug,--so was the hostelry
called,--heavily descended the creaking stairs. “Now, man,” said the
sufferer, sternly, “swear that you will never reveal,--swear, I say! And
by the great God whose angels are about this night, if ever you break
the oath, I will come back and haunt you to your dying day!”
Dummie's face grew pale, for he was superstitiously affected by the
vehemence and the language of the dying woman, and he answered, as he
kissed the pretended Bible, that he swore to keep the secret, as much as
he knew of it, which, she must be sensible, he said, was very little. As
he spoke, the wind swept with a loud and sudden gust down the chimney,
and shook the roof above them so violently as to loosen many of the
crumbling tiles, which fell one after the other, with a crashing noise,
on the pavement below. Dummie started in affright; and perhaps his
conscience smote him for the trick he had played with regard to the
false Bible. But the woman, whose excited and unstrung nerves led her
astray from one subject to another with preternatural celerity, said,
with an hysterical laugh, “See, Dummie, they come in state for me; give
me the cap--yonder--and bring the looking-glass!”
Dummie obeyed; and the woman, as she in a low tone uttered something
about the unbecoming colour of the ribbons, adjusted the cap on her
head, and then, saying in a regretful and petulant voice, “Why should
they have cut off my hair? Such a disfigurement!” bade Dummie desire
Mrs. Margery once more to ascend to her.
Left alone with her child, the face of the wretched mother softened as
she regarded him, and all the levities and all the vehemences--if we
may use the word--which, in the turbulent commotion of her delirium, had
been stirred upward to the surface of her mind, gradually now sank as
death increased upon her, and a mother's anxiety rose to the natural
level from which it had been disturbed and abased. She took the child
to her bosom, and clasping him in her arms, which grew weaker with every
instant, she soothed him with the sort of chant which nurses sing over
their untoward infants; but her voice was cracked and hollow, and as she
felt it was so, the mother's eyes filled with tears. Mrs. Margery now
reentered; and turning towards the hostess with an impressive calmness
of manner which astonished and awed the person she addressed, the dying
woman pointed to the child and said,--
“You have been kind to me, very kind, and may God bless you for it! I
have found that those whom the world calls the worst are often the most
human. But I am not going to thank you as I ought to do, but to ask of
you a last and exceeding favour. Protect my child till he grows up.
You have often said you loved him,--you are childless yourself,--and a
morsel of bread and a shelter for the night, which is all I ask of you
to give him, will not impoverish more legitimate claimants.”
Poor Mrs. Margery, fairly sobbing, vowed she would be a mother to the
child, and that she would endeavour to rear him honestly; though a
public-house was not, she confessed, the best place for good examples.
“Take him,” cried the mother, hoarsely, as her voice, failing her
strength, rattled indistinctly, and almost died within her. “Take him,
rear him as you will, as you can; any example, any roof, better than--”
Here the words were inaudible. “And oh, may it be a curse and a--Give me
the medicine; I am dying.”
The hostess, alarmed, hastened to comply; but before she returned to the
bedside, the sufferer was insensible,--nor did she again recover speech
or motion. A low and rare moan only testified continued life, and within
two hours that ceased, and the spirit was gone. At that time our good
hostess was herself beyond the things of this outer world, having
supported her spirits during the vigils of the night with so many
little liquid stimulants that they finally sank into that torpor
which generally succeeds excitement. Taking, perhaps, advantage of the
opportunity which the insensibility of the hostess afforded him, Dummie,
by the expiring ray of the candle that burned in the death-chamber,
hastily opened a huge box (which was generally concealed under the bed,
and contained the wardrobe of the deceased), and turned with irreverent
hand over the linens and the silks, until quite at the bottom of the
trunk he discovered some packets of letters; these he seized, and buried
in the conveniences of his dress. He then, rising and replacing the box,
cast a longing eye towards the watch on the toilet-table, which was of
gold; but he withdrew his gaze, and with a querulous sigh observed to
himself: “The old blowen kens of that, 'od rat her! but, howsomever,
I'll take this: who knows but it may be of sarvice. Tannies to-day may
be smash to-morrow!” [Meaning, what is of no value now may be precious
hereafter.] and he laid his coarse hand on the golden and silky tresses
we have described. “'T is a rum business, and puzzles I; but mum's the
word for my own little colquarren [neck].”
With this brief soliloquy Dummie descended the stairs and let himself
out of the house.