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The “Supplementary Chapter” to Bulwer Lytton's A Strange Story

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Andrew Brown
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Extract

On August 3, 1860 Dickens wrote to his friend Bulwer Lytton asking whether he might be prepared to contribute “a tale” to All the Year Round. The inquiry was speculative, but prompted by characteristic editorial foresight. The magazine's current serial, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, was nearing completion, Charles Lever's A Day's Ride was waiting to take over from it, and Dickens himself was beginning to contemplate a new novel which, as Great Expectations, was subsequently issued between December 1860 and August 1861. Evidently he was already thinking of their successor, and clearly he recognized that Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, ex-cabinet minister and pillar of the literary establishment, would be a real catch. Bulwer did not reply immediately, though he was in fact already making preliminary sketches for the novel that would become A Strange Story. The idea for the book had come to him in a dream (as, twenty years earlier, had that for his other great tale of the supernatural, Zanoni), and as it developed during the summer of 1860 it gradually supplanted his other work in progress — the historical novel of ancient Greece Pausanias the Spartan (eventually published posthumously in 1876, still incomplete). In October 1860, while vacationing in Corfu, he noted ruefully that his “mystic story” was at a standstill, but on his return to England the following month he was sufficiently encouraged to respond, at least tentatively, to Dickens's inquiry.

Type
Special Effects
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 157 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

NOTES

1. The Letters of Charles Dickens [hereafter Dickens], ed. Dexter, Walter, 3 vols. (London: Nonesuch, 1938) 3: 169.Google Scholar

2. The Life of Edward Bulwer First Lord Lytton by his Grandson the Earl of Lytton [hereafter Life], 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1913) 2: 341.Google Scholar

3. Dickens 3: 194.Google Scholar

4. Blackwood, John to Bulwer Lytton, Jan 10, 1861 (letter in the National Library of Scotland)Google Scholar quoted in Sutherland, J. A., Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: Athlone; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976) 181.Google Scholar

5. Jan 8, 1861, quoted in Usrey, Malcolm O., “The Letters of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton to the Editors of Blackwood's Magazine, 1840–1873, in the National Library of Scotland,” diss., Texas Technological College, 1963, 238Google Scholar. Dickens indeed felt suitably obliged, writing to Bulwer on Jan 23, 1861 “I can honestly assure you that I have never been so pleased at heart in all my literary life, as I am in the proud thought of standing side by side with you before this great audience” (Dickens 3: 207).Google Scholar

6. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Haight, Gordon S., 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1954–1978) 4: 35.Google Scholar

7. For an account of this correspondence, see Sutherland, 181–82Google Scholar and Wolff, Robert Lee, Strange Stories and Other Explorations in Victorian Fiction, (Boston: Gambit, 1971) 288–92.Google Scholar

8. Dickens 3: 219–20.Google Scholar

9. The George Eliot Letters 3: 468.Google Scholar

10. In fact, just two (see below) of Bulwer's letters to Dickens and Wills are extant, so for the most part his side of the correspondence can be inferred only from theirs.

11. Dickens 3: 218–9.Google Scholar

12. Dickens 3: 219Google Scholar. “[A] more startling title,” Dickens argued, “would take the (John) Bull by the horns, and would be a serviceable concession to your misgiving, as suggesting a story off the stones of the gas-lighted Brentford Road.”

13. Dickens 3: 221.Google Scholar

14. Dickens 3: 194.Google Scholar

15. Dickens 3: 223–4.Google Scholar

16. Dickens 3: 169.Google Scholar

17. Letter in the Pierpont Morgan Library, qtd in Sutherland, 184–85.Google Scholar

18. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Ray, Gordon N., 4 vols. (London: Oxford UP; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1945–1946) 3: 181nGoogle Scholar. Knebworth House, in Hertfordshire, was the ancestral home of the Lytton family, which Bulwer had inherited from his mother.

19. Unpublished letter in the Hertfordshire County Record Office [hereafter Hertford] (ref. D/EK C12, no. 124).

20. See Sutherland, 185.Google Scholar

21. Dickens 3: 226.Google Scholar

22. Sutherland, 185.Google Scholar

23. Life 2: 345.Google Scholar

24. Unpublished letter (Hertford, D/EK C27).

25. March 22, 1862: 188.

26. Unpublished letter (Hertford, D/EK C14).

27. Dec 18, 1861 (Dickens 3: 268Google Scholar).

28. The epigraph, on the title-page of both volumes, reads “To doubt and to be astonished is to recognise our ignorance. Hence it is that the lover of wisdom is in a certain sort a lover of mythi (ϕιλóμυθósπωs), for the subject of mythi is the astonishing and the marvellous” (Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, ed. Mansel, H. L. and John, Veitch, 4 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1859–1860) 1: 78).Google Scholar

29. Dickens 3: 269.Google Scholar

30. This, one of the only two surviving letters from Bulwer to Dickens about A Strange Story, is printed by Bulwer's grandson (Life, 2: 345–7)Google Scholar, who dates it as late 1861 or early 1862. Wolff (292) assigns it to “mid-December 1861.” In fact, its content makes fairly plain that it is by way of a reply to Dickens's of December 20, and prior to Dickens's of December 26 (see below).

31. Margrave's very name is readily symbolic of the man who has cheated death — and who used to be known as Louis Grayle, who sought the fabled prize of the elixir vitae.

32. From 1858–59 Bulwer had served as Secretary of State for the Colonies. One of his principal achievements was to preside over the formal separation from New South Wales of the new colony of Queensland. It is likely that this experience prompted the interest in Australian topography that is evident in the final quarter of the novel.

33. The model Bulwer invoked here was Harriet, Martineau's “key” to Zanoni (1842), which he had appended to popular reprints of the book from 1853 onwards.Google Scholar

34. Dickens 3: 270.Google Scholar

35. Unpublished letter (Hertford, D/EK C14).

36. Life 2: 35, 34.Google Scholar

37. A letter from Dickens to Bulwer on January 24, 1862 makes no mention of the chapter.

38. Dickens 3: 220.Google Scholar

39. Unpublished letter (Hertford, D/EK Cll, no. 141).

40. See below, notes 64 and 70. He did not, however, comply with Forster's advice in the same letter to augment the roles of Mr. Vigors and Leopold Smythe in order to balance the French Professor's too-dominant role in the conversation — perhaps because to do so properly would have required more time than was available to him under so hurried a schedule.

41. Unpublished letter from Wills to Bulwer (Hertford, D/EK Cll, no. 140).

42. Three of the four critics who have published special studies of the novel — Sutherland, Wolff, and Fradin, J. I. (“‘The Absorbing Tyranny of Every-day Life:’ Bulwer Lytton's A Strange Story,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16 [1961–1962]) — seem to have been unaware that the chapter was ever draftedGoogle Scholar. This is scarcely surprising given that the only corroborative references to its existence (the letters from Forster and Wills) are buried, along with the manuscript, serial galleys, and printed sheets of the chapter itself, in the vast and only partially catalogued Bulwer Lytton archive at Hertford (these last three documents are in bundle D/EK W25). The fourth of these critics, Edwin Eigner, remarks in passing that the chapter “got as far as page proofs” (a reference, presumably, to the printed sheets at Hertford — there are no page proofs extant): see “Raphael in Oxford Street: Bulwer's Accommodation to the Realists,” The Nineteenth-Century Writer and his Audience, ed. Orel, Harold and Worth, George J., (Lawrence, Kansas: U of Kansas Publications, 1969) 71–72.Google Scholar

43. See below, p. 165.

44. March 8, 1862: 223.

45. Feb 15, 1862: 220.

46. April 23, 1862: 401.

47. See above, pp. 160–61.

48. Unpublished letter (Hertford, D/EK C27).

49. Dickens 3: 234.Google Scholar

50. I should like to thank David Lytton Cobbold, who controls the copyrights in unpublished material by Bulwer, for permission to publish the chapter here.

51. Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), natural philosopher and scientist, inventor of the kaleidoscope and author of numerous pioneering works on “the positive science of optics” (see p. 167), and a noted sceptic regarding the activities of spirit mediums. The specific reference here is to his Letters on Natural Magic (1832).Google Scholar

52. The distinguished astronomer Sir John Herschel (1792–1871) was knighted for services to science on the occasion of Queen Victoria's coronation in 1838 — at the same time as Bulwer himself received the honor for services to literature.

53. Goethe's remark is recorded in a conversation with Eckermann of May 6, 1827. The translation is Bulwer's own. More literally, the second sentence should be rendered “As if I know that myself and could put it into words.” At much the same time as he was writing A Strange Story, Bulwer was working on a series of essays which, under the title Caxtoniana, were published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine between Feb 1862 and Oct 1863 and in volume form in 1863. A number of references in the supplementary chapter to A Strange Story are repeated in Caxtoniana. In this instance the quotation from Goethe may also be found in the essay “On the Moral Effects of Writers,” Caxtoniana, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1863) 1: 189.Google Scholar

54. That the distinguished continental professor is French, rather than German (as are the heavyweight intellectual authorities most frequently cited in Bulwer's works), seems appropriate given the primacy of the ideas of Maine de Biran and Victor Cousin (see below, notes 72 and 73) to the guiding conception of the novel.

55. See Montaigne's essay “Of Cripples,” Plato's Phaedrus, and (see below, note 78) Aristotle's Metaphysics.

56. Besides the French professor, Mr. Smythe is the only character in the supplementary chapter who does not appear in the body of the novel.

57. In December 1861, while preparing his Caxtoniana essays, Bulwer wrote to his son that he had “gone through a vast amount of physiological and metaphysical reading” (Life 2: 352). Many of the books he consulted (or re-consulted) are referred to in the later stages of the novel, including: Hibbert, Samuel, Sketches on the Philosophy of Apparitions (1825)Google Scholar; Abercrombie, John, Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth (1830)Google Scholar; SirBrewster, David, Letters on Natural Magic (1832)Google Scholar; Müller, Johannes, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1834–1840)Google Scholar, which he read in Baly, William's translation as Elements of Physiology (1837–1842)Google Scholar; Townshend, Chauncey Hare, Facts in Mesmerism (1840)Google Scholar; de Gembloux, Claude Pierquin, Idiomologie des Animaux (1844)Google Scholar; SirHolland, Henry, Chapters on Mental Physiology (1852)Google Scholar; SirHamilton, William, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1859–1860)Google Scholar; Tissot, Claude Joseph, La Vie dans l'Homme (1861)Google Scholar; and six of the eight “Bridge-water Treatises on the Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation” — by Chalmers, Thomas (On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man, 1833)Google Scholar, Kidd, John (On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Physical Condition of Man, 1833)Google Scholar, Whewell, William (On Astronomy and General Physics, 1833)Google Scholar, Roget, Peter Mark (On Animal and Vegetable Physiology, 1834)Google Scholar, Kirby, William (On the History, Habits, and Instincts of Animals, 1835)Google Scholar, and Buckland, William (On Geology and Mineralogy, 1836)Google Scholar

58. The phrase “the march of intellect” was coined by Robert Southey in his Sir Thomas More: or, the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), and was widely used to denote the spread of learning among the laboring classes, such as Mechanics' Institutes sought to promote. The conservative Mrs. Poyntz is clearly sceptical about the average ability of the guest lecturers at such Institutes, though Bulwer himself was numbered among their ranks, in 1852 having addressed the Mechanics' Institute at Royston, Hertfordshire, not far from his ancestral home at Knebworth, and in the county for which he served as Member of Parliament.

59. In his essay “On the Normal Clairvoyance of the Imagination” Bulwer explains that the term rapport was used by mesmerists to denote a patient's “unconscious sympathy … with the will of the person who has cast him into sleep” (Caxtoniana 1: 41).

60. The modern phenomenon of spiritualism first manifested itself in Hydesville, New York in 1848. Having swept through the eastern states of the US, the vogue for seances was introduced to Europe in the early 1850s, to Britain most notoriously by the Scottish-American medium Daniel Dunglas Home, who between 1855 and 1870 conducted numerous seances for prominent members of London society (including, among the litterati, Thackeray, Ruskin. the Brownings, Dickens, and Bulwer). Supposed conversations with the famous dead were standard party pieces of the early mediums. Bacon and Franklin were frequent interlocutors, presumably because of their well-attested interest in the occult. The latter, for example, was a favored communicant of the clairvoyant Fox sisters of Hydesville, Margaretta aged 15 and Katie aged 12, though more than one observer recorded that, as represented by the Foxes, Franklin used surprisingly poor grammar. Still more remarkable were the activities of John Worth Edmonds, a New York State senator and a judge of the New York Supreme Court, who in the mid-1850s, together with his daughter Laura (referred to by Bulwer in a passage deleted from the serial proofs of the supplementary chapter [see note 64]) and his friend Dr. George T. Dexter (with whom in 1853 he co-authored the influential volume Spiritualism), claimed to be in regular communication with the shades of Bacon and Swedenborg.

61. Like his near contemporary David Brewster, the celebrated scientist Michael Faraday (1791–1867), the discoverer of magneto-electricity, was deeply sceptical of the spirit manifestations that swept London in the 1850s. The apparently spontaneous movement of tables during seances, he argued, were probably caused by unconscious muscular efforts on the part of over-excited attendees, if not by the simple device of a mechanical apparatus hidden beneath the tablecloth and worked by the medium's foot.

62. The French “prestidigitator” Jean Robert-Houdin (1805–71), from whom the American conjuror and escapologist Harry Houdini took his stage name, performed regularly on stage in London (including before the Queen) during the 1850s. He prided himself on exposing fakes, and in his Mémoires (1859) and Les Secrets de la Prestidigitation et de la Magie (1868) freely explained how the tricks of the trade were effected. The phenomenon of “table-talking,” for example, could be achieved by a variety of methods: either by ventriloquism or, as regarded rapping sounds on the table in answer to questions or to spell out words, by the snapping of toe joints, the clicking of thumb nails, or even the use of lead shot in the hems of garments.

63. The phenomena to which Mrs. Poyntz alludes — the appearance or even touch of apparently disembodied hands, and the levitation of the person or pieces of furniture — were all standard effects in the repertory of more accomplished mediums. All were explained by Robert-Houdin in his Memoires, and would have been familiar to Bulwer, who attended numerous seances by leading practitioners such as D.D. Home, the French clairvoyant Alexis Didier, and the American medium Charles H. Forster, whom Conan Doyle, surprisingly, identified as the original of Margrave in A Strange Story: see History of Spiritualism, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1926) 2: 21Google Scholar. Bulwer is also known to have attended experiments by the hypnotist James Braid, the phrenologist John Ashburner, and the mesmerist-physician John Elliottson (who believed himself the model for Dr. Lloyd in A Strange Story). Bulwer's continuing reputation as a devotee of Victorian spiritualism is nicely attested by his cameo role in A. S. Byatt's novel Possession (1990).

64. The following passage was deleted by Bulwer at this point on the serial proofs in line with Forster's advice in his letter of 23 January 1862:

In my innocence, as a woman of the world, on my guard against any conceivable trick on the part of the world, the flesh, and the other bad agency which shall be nameless, I had fancied that this satirical tale-teller, who has evidently the same mocking purpose as a writer immeasurably more imaginative (Dean Swift, in his Voyage to Laputa), had at least one original fancy; that is, the Luminous Shadow of Margrave. But a friend of mine belonging to the enlightened middle class, sends me a book, first written two centuries ago; here it is, “Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World,” in which I discover that old women in the States of New England were tried and executed on no evidence against them so strong as that of their own shadows. You say that is two centuries ago. But what do I find said in this century? Look and see; it is put into print, and a friend of mine, a man of some mark on the Exchange, who would beat us all in a bargain, sends me the Journal, and tells me he will stake a hundred thousand pounds on the truth of the statement. What. I ask, what do I see? That the daughter of a judge in America, “can sometimes at will project her spirit. appearing in form, and delivering messages to friends in sympathy with her, even though living at a distance.” You say. “Well, America is a strange country.” But read on what is said in the English Journal: “The power of the spirit to leave the natural body and to present itself in visible form and identity to another, though rare (rare, I should hope so!) is not an attribute of Miss Edmunds's mediumship only, as I am acquainted with a lady resident in London who has the same power, and who has exercised it several times.” Now, I made inquiries about the lady thus mentioned, and I am told that she is the wife of a gentleman so far responsible for a wife he lives with and honours, that he himself is an authority in scholarship and divinity.

65. The antiquarian John Aubrey (1626–97), a lifelong recorder of occult phenomena, wrote about unexplained knocking sounds on panelling and pieces of furniture (often thought to betoken the impending death of someone in the household) in his Miscellanies (1696).Google Scholar

66. Burdach, Karl Friedrich (1776–1847), German physiologistGoogle Scholar. The reference is to his Die Physiologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft (1826–1940).Google Scholar

67. Bulwer is probably alluding to the conclusion of Alfred Maury in La Magie et l'Astrologie (see note 69), which in Caxtoniana (1: 241) he renders as “The secret of magic is to be found in physiology.” That natural science might, if properly directed, explain phenomena which were generally though of as supernatural, was one of Bulwer's most strongly held convictions. What is termed “supernatural,” he argued in 1859, “is only a something in the laws of nature of which we have hitherto been ignorant” (“The Haunted and the Haunters; or, the House and the Brain,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 86: 231). Writing about A Strange Story to John Forster in December 1861, he confided “I do believe in the substance of what used to be called Magic, that is, I believe there are persons of a peculiar temperament who can effect very extraordinary things not accounted for satisfactorily by any existent philosophy” (Life 2: 48; my italics).

68. The two quotations that follow are from ch. 14 of the novel (September 7, 1861; 1: 98).

69. Maury, Louis Ferdinand Alfred (1817–1892), French historian and metaphysician. The reference here is to his La Magie et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquité et au Moyen-age (1860). Bulwer quotes in the novel both from this work and from Maury's subsequent volume Le Sommeil et les Rives (1861). See also note 67.Google Scholar

70. The following passage was deleted by Bulwer at this point in line with Forster's advice in his letter of 23 January 1862:

When St. Francis of Assise had once by concentration of thought, imagination, or desire, produced on his own person the actual marks of crucifixion, the supposed miracle became epidemic, and “stigmata” grew so numerous as to cease to be miraculous. What has lately seemed so new to London and New York in the appearance of characters and signs on the flesh of a medium, is but a repetition of marvels very familiar to us of the Continent. Your reasoners are in the infancy of hypothesis when they say “Imposture and conjuring.” We have got a stage beyond that conjecture. Pic de la Mirondola saw with his own eyes the print of the crown of thorns on the head of St. Katherine; in 1813 the Count de Stolberg saw the stigmata, or marks on the body of Jane Catherine Emmerich; M. de Hartwig, no superstitious enthusiast, saw the marks on Marie de Maeril, the nun of the order of St. Francis, from which blood flowed chiefly during the holy week, and on the jour de fête of the Marks (or stigmata) of St. Francis. You Protestants say at once “The imposture of the Papists,” I, Philosopher, say, “No, look to pathology, and you will find that enthusiasm will effect what imposture cannot do.” The main apparent difference between the spirit manifesters and the marvel-workers of old, is this — that the former ascribe to the spirits of the dead what their predecessors ascribed to demons, or to angels, or to fairies. But still the spirit manifesters equally allow that some spirits are good, some bad, and many as trivial as fairies themselves; the difference between their belief and that of their forefathers is, therefore, not very material. Both have a common character in these respects. First, they do but express ideas current in the world before, and so consonant with the preconception of human brains that a thoughtful philosopher can only see in them agencies produced by human organisations. Thus in the classic world, we have well attested legends of the apparition of a Venus, a Ceres, or a Nymph or a Satyr, because in these beings the classic world believed. No man can suppose the virtuous Antoninus was a liar when he tells us of a vision in which he was directed to remedies for his complaints by the apparitions of heathen deities. But no man, now-a-days, can believe that those heathen deities themselves ever existed — if they never existed, why their forms could never really have appeared. So in the Papal Communities of the earlier ages, the apparitions recorded, and the miracles attested, are all consonant with the Papal ideas of those times. The image of the Virgin moves the pilgrimage to a saint's tomb, or the touch of a saint's relic cures diseases. In our time the mind does not run much upon demons, and, I fear, no very enthusiastic homage is paid to saints. But one belief appertaining to what is called (not always correctly) the Supernatural does, thank heaven, remain as general amongst the middle class of this Century as of any century that has gone before it, viz. a belief that the dead do not die for ever; accordingly it is the spirits of the dead who do for modern magicians what the demons did for the old ones. And their revelations conform to the human ideas of the spectators generally, Papal, Protestant, Puritanic, or Swedenborgian, according to the character, not always of the immediate circle, but of the general influences of the society in which that circle is a part. Mostly, indeed, the revelations favour the Swedenborgian mysticism, and naturally enough, because the Swedenborgian mysticism mostly favours the rationale of such manifestations.

71. The influential Swedish philosopher, visionary, and biblical exegete Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was known especially for propounding an intimate link between the natural and spiritual worlds. Bulwer himself had studied his ideas in some detail, but here he refers to their nineteenth-century appropriation, largely through the “New Jerusalem Church,” by the lowest common denominator of credulous minds, for whom Swedenborgianism came to be associated with all manner of mystic or psychic speculations concerning the life of the soul.

72. Pierre François Gonthier Maine de Biran (1766–1824), French philosopher. The quotations that follow from “his last sublimest work” are from Nouveaux Essais d'Anthropologie, ou de la Science de l'Homme Intérieure, in Oeuvres Inédites ed. Naville, Ernest, 3 vols. [Paris, 1859] 1: v, 3: 546, 524 (the translations are Bulwer's own).Google Scholar

73. (1792–1867), French philosopher who sought to reconcile the pragmatism of Condillac and Locke with the idealism of Kant and Hegel. The preface to the book-form edition of A Strange Story opens with the words “Of the many illustrious thinkers whom the schools of France have contributed to the intellectual philosophy of our age, Victor Cousin [is] the most accomplished” (1: iii). Cousin's precise appreciation of Maine de Biran was as “le premier metaphysicien français de notre temps” (Oeuvres Philosophiques de Maine de Biran, ed. Cousin, Victor, 4 vols. (Paris, 1841) 1: xi).Google Scholar

74. In the preface to the novel (1: viii) Bulwer repeats this same formulation: that the “faculty of causation” had all but displaced “delight in the Marvellous” (the faculty of admiration which he identifies as the true basis of knowledge, see p. 166). The observation is fundamental to his diagnosis of the spiritual malady of an age in which empirical scientific method had come to dominate the consciousness of an already utilitarian nation. Such a pass was no more than Carlyle had warned of in Sartor Resartus, where he decried “That progress of Science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration” (Works, ed. Traill, H. D., 30 vols. (London, 1896–1899) 1: 53)Google Scholar. Intellectually, Bulwer and Carlyle had much in common. Indeed, no apter argument of the argument of A Strange Story could be found than in the following passage from the opening of On Heroes and Hero-Worship: “Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical” (Works, 5: 8).Google Scholar

75. The particular works to which Bulwer alludes are probably Kant's, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790)Google Scholar; Schelling's, System des tranzendentalen Idealismus (1800)Google Scholar; Hegel, 's posthumously published Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik (1842–1843)Google Scholar; the Essais de Philosophie, de Politique, et de Littérature (1832)Google Scholar by the German historian and political philosopher Johann Peter Friedrich Ancillon (1766–1837), from which Bulwer quotes both in the body of the novel and in his Caxtoniana essay “On the Difference between Active Thought and Reverie;” Cousin's, Victor Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien (1836)Google Scholar; and “On the Sublime” from the Philosophical Essays (1810)Google Scholar of the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), from which Bulwer quotes in his own essay “On the Moral Effects of Writers.”

76. See An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), ch. 10: “Of Miracles.”Google Scholar

77. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–80), French empiricist philosopher who contended that even the highest human knowledge is assimilated through the physical and mental faculties alone. In ch. 32 of A Strange Story Fenwick confesses “On the theorems of Condillac, I, in common with numberless contemporary students (for, in my youth, Condillac held sway in the schools, as now, driven forth from the schools, his opinions float loose through the talk and the scribble of men of the world, who perhaps never opened his page) — on the theorems of Condillac I had built up a system of thought designed to immure the swathed form of material philosophy from all rays and all sounds of a world not material, as the walls of some blind mausoleum shut out, from the mummy within, the whisper of winds, and the gleaming of stars” (2: 236).

78. Bulwer is probably alluding to Aristotle, whose Metaphysics (bk. 1, ch. 2) provides the standard ancient reference to “wonder” as the origin of philosophy; in his essay “On the Moral Effects of Writers” he quotes Aristotle, though without furnishing a precise source, as stating that “Wonder is the first cause of philosophy” (Caxtoniana, 1: 184)Google Scholar; and to Kant, the concluding section of whose Kritik der praktischen Vernuft (1788)Google Scholar stresses the finitude of human knowledge in contrast to the infinite wonder and reverence inspired by the starry heavens above and by the innate sense of moral order within men.

79. The reference here is probably to the Symposium (209.e.5 — 212.c.2).

80. The quotation is from Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik (pt. 1, ch. 3. sec. B2. subsec. 3b: “Die handlenden Individuen“); the translation appears to be Bulwer's own.

81. Whatever else was omitted by way of explanation, Bulwer was evidently determined that this summary of the book's symbolic design, which he had outlined to Dickens in his letter of late December 1861 (see above, p. 161), should be put explicitly before the reader. When the supplementary chapter was dropped, he included a close precis of this speech by the Professor in the preface (1: ix–x).