This eBook was produced by David Widger
By Edward Bulwer-Lytton
"FALKLAND" is the earliest of Lord Lytton's prose fictions. Publishedbefore "Pelham," it was written in the boyhood of its illustrious author.In the maturity of his manhood and the fulness of his literary popularityhe withdrew it from print. This is one of the first English editions ofhis collected works in which the tale reappears. It is because themorality of it was condemned by his experienced judgment, that the authorof "Falkland" deliberately omitted it from each of the numerous reprintsof his novels and romances which were published in England during hislifetime.
With the consent of the author's son, "Falkland" is included in thepresent edition of his collected works.
In the first place, this work has been for many years, and still is,accessible to English readers in every country except England. Thecontinental edition of it, published by Baron Tauchnitz, has a widecirculation; and since for this reason the book cannot practically bewithheld from the public, it is thought desirable that the publication ofit should at least be accompanied by some record of the abovementionedfact.
In the next place, the considerations which would naturally guide anauthor of established reputation in the selection of early compositionsfor subsequent republication, are obviously inapplicable to thepreparation of a posthumous standard edition of his collected works.Those who read the tale of "Falkland" eight-and-forty years ago' havelong survived the age when character is influenced by the literature ofsentiment. The readers to whom it is now presented are not Lord Lytton'scontemporaries; they are his posterity. To them his works have alreadybecome classical. It is only upon the minds of the young that the worksof sentiment have any appreciable moral influence. But the sentiment ofeach age is peculiar to itself; and the purely moral influence ofsentimental fiction seldom survives the age to which it was firstaddressed. The youngest and most impressionable reader of such works asthe "Nouvelle Hemise," "Werther," "The Robbers," "Corinne," or "Rene," isnot now likely to be morally influenced, for good or ill, by theperusal of those masterpieces of genius. Had Byron attained the age atwhich great authors most realise the responsibilities of fame and genius,he might possibly have regretted, and endeavoured to suppress, thepublication of "Don Juan;" but the possession of that immortal poem is anunmixed benefit to posterity, and the loss of it would have been anirreparable misfortune.
"Falkland," although the earliest, is one of the most carefully finishedof its author's compositions. All that was once turbid, heating,unwholesome in the current of sentiment which flows through this historyof a guilty passion, "Death's immortalising winter" has chilled andpurified. The book is now a harmless, and, it may be hoped, a notuninteresting, evidence of the precocity of its author's genius. Assuch, it is here reprinted.
[It was published in 1827]
L—-, May —, 1822.
You are mistaken, my dear Monkton! Your description of the gaiety of"the season" gives me no emotion. You speak of pleasure; I remember nolabour so wearisome; you enlarge upon its changes; no sameness appears tome so monotonous. Keep, then, your pity for those who require it. Fromthe height of