Pelham

In his column in today’s Times Michael Gove confidently asserts that no-one reads Bulwer-Lytton these days.

As it happens, Pelham is one of my favourite novels.

The writing is (even after all this time) fresh and contemporary in feel. It is also very funny. In this book (if not his others) Bulwer-Lytton is as good as Anthony Trollope.

Pelham is “a man of fashion” in Regency London. Bulwer-Lytton contructs Pelham through anthropological insights that completely bring the character to life. In terms of cynically-charged enthusiasm, dandyish self-expression and Byronic self-actualisation Pelham could equally be a nineteenth-century aristocrat, a New York rap artist or James Purnell.

I bought my copy of Pelham from a second-hand bookshop. The shop had just received several complete sets of Bulwer-Lytton from a grammar school library that was downsizing. The individual volumes were being sold off at one pound each (in fairness to Michael Gove, Pelham had the pages uncut, so I was the first person to read the book since it was printed in 1895).