The Unusual Tale Behind English Literature's Most Notorious Sentence

When it comes to crafting the opening line of a novel, the possibilities are nearly endless. However, if your goal is to begin a story in a notoriously poor manner, even a cartoon beagle would advise using the infamous phrase: 'It was a dark and stormy night.'

This line has become so deeply embedded in our literary traditions that its origins are seldom considered. When Edward Bulwer-Lytton first wrote it, he likely had no inkling of the notoriety it would achieve. Once as celebrated as his contemporary Charles Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton is now primarily remembered for this single, poorly constructed sentence. It’s a curious fate for a writer who was not only prolific but also influential in shaping modern genres, contributing to the birth of science fiction fandom, pioneering elements of crime fiction, and inadvertently inspiring significant social change.

“A Loud Cry”

The iconic line 'It was a dark and stormy night' introduces Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, which follows a highwayman who masquerades as a nobleman as part of a scheme. (Unbeknownst to him, he is actually the offspring of a renowned judge.) In the preface to an 1840 edition, Bulwer-Lytton explained that he wrote Paul Clifford partly to critique the flaws in England’s legal system. The novel focuses on the societal conditions that drive its protagonist into criminality, including a wrongful imprisonment for pickpocketing. In 1848, Bulwer-Lytton described the book as 'a loud cry to amend the circumstance' and 'redeem the victim.' According to The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, Paul Clifford was 'one of the most important novels of the 1830s.'

Today, however, the book is remembered almost solely for its opening seven words, leaving much of its historical context forgotten. Interestingly, those seven words make up only a fraction of Paul Clifford’s elaborate opening sentence, which in its entirety reads:

"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 housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

While Bulwer-Lytton is often credited—or blamed—for popularizing the phrase, 'a dark and stormy night' was already a well-worn cliché by the time he used it. Variations of the phrase had appeared in English literature for centuries before Paul Clifford. Edward Herbert’s poem 'To His Mistress for Her True Picture,' published in 1665 but likely written around 1631, includes the line 'Our life is but a dark and stormy night.' Ann Radcliffe employed similar phrasing in her 1790 gothic novel A Sicilian Romance ('a very dark and stormy night') and in 1791’s The Romance of the Forest ('The night was dark and tempestuous'). Edward Anderson’s poem 'The Sailor,' written at least 30 years before Paul Clifford, also features the phrase 'This cheers us in the dark and stormy night.'

Victorian authors like Bulwer-Lytton were famously fascinated by England’s rainy climate, making it unsurprising that he would use this trope to open his crime novel. 'In the landscape of English literary history, the 19th century is the dampest place,' writes Alexandra Harris, author of 2016’s Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies, in an essay for The Guardian. 'Victorian rainfall levels were no higher than average … but Victorian writers perceived their world as a watery one.'

The Complex Legacy of Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Despite the extensive discussion about London’s dampness and the phrase’s widespread use, it was Bulwer-Lytton’s novel that cemented the 'dark and stormy night' phrasing in its current form. James L. Campbell, author of the 1986 biography Edward Bulwer-Lytton, notes that Paul Clifford was a massive success, selling out its entire, unusually large first print run on its release day in April 1830. It is regarded as the first 'Newgate novel,' a series of Victorian crime stories inspired by the sensational and graphic tales of inmates at London’s infamous Newgate Prison. While not the earliest crime novels, the Newgate books were revolutionary for their perspective, being among the first to feature criminals as protagonists, paving the way for works like Double Indemnity and Dexter. Paul Clifford even incorporates elements of true crime, referencing the exploits of the notorious 18th-century highwayman Dick Turpin.

However, the book wasn’t universally praised. Fraser’s Magazine published a harsh, lengthy critique of Paul Clifford, labeling it 'a tissue of gross personalities' with a 'reprehensible' moral. Even during his lifetime, Bulwer-Lytton’s writing was notorious for its lack of quality. 'His mere English is grossly defective—turgid, involved, and ungrammatical,' wrote Edgar Allan Poe in his review of Bulwer-Lytton’s 1841 novel Night and Morning. William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, harbored a deep dislike for Bulwer-Lytton and frequently criticized him, even mocking his style in a lengthy 1847 parody.

Despite his flaws as a writer, Bulwer-Lytton was immensely popular during his lifetime and held in high esteem by many contemporaries. By the time of his death in 1873 from complications related to an ear infection, he had authored nearly 30 novels, numerous plays, several poetry collections, and historical works on England and Athens. U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant was an admirer, as were Mary Shelley, George Bernard Shaw, and Aleister Crowley. His 1837 novel Ernest Maltravers became the first major European fiction work translated into Japanese. Bulwer-Lytton even influenced fashion: his 1828 novel Pelham is credited with popularizing black as the standard for men’s evening attire. He shared a close friendship with Charles Dickens, who named his 10th child Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens. Dickens also valued his advice, as Bulwer-Lytton persuaded him to rewrite the original, bleak ending of Great Expectations into a more hopeful one. Bulwer-Lytton’s 1862 novel A Strange Story is thought to have influenced Dracula, and his 1871 sci-fi novel The Coming Race inspired the first sci-fi convention and spawned an exceptionally bizarre Nazi conspiracy theory.

However, if you feel sympathy for Bulwer-Lytton being remembered for one unfortunate sentence, consider his wife Rosina’s perspective. She accused him of abuses such as kicking her while pregnant, biting her, attacking her with a knife, and having her committed to a sanitorium for opposing his political ambitions. (Beyond writing, Edward served in Parliament and as Secretary of State for the Colonies, overseeing the founding of British Columbia.)

Rosina secured her release after three weeks and ensured her case received widespread attention. Public outrage over her treatment helped drive reforms to oppressive laws that allowed influential men to institutionalize inconvenient relatives, particularly wives, for reasons like expressing opinions or seeking financial independence. Activist John Perceval wrote in 1858 that a high-profile case like Rosina’s was necessary to galvanize public support and media attention. The following year, Parliament established a committee to investigate abuses in the mental health system. (Years later, Rosina’s granddaughter, Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton, would become a prominent suffragette.)

Perhaps there’s poetic justice in Bulwer-Lytton’s literary decline. After the publication of Paul Clifford, his ornate writing style fell out of favor, and he transitioned from a celebrated author to a minor figure in Victorian literature. While he coined phrases like 'the pen is mightier than the sword' (from his play Richelieu) and 'the great unwashed' (from Paul Clifford), he is primarily remembered for 'It was a dark and stormy night.'

It Could Have Been Worse

By the mid-20th century, Bulwer-Lytton had largely faded into obscurity, but his iconic opening line endured. In 1962, Madeleine L’Engle borrowed 'It was a dark and stormy night' to begin her beloved fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time. Charles Schulz further immortalized it in 1965 when he used it as the opening line for Snoopy’s fictional novel [PDF], and Ray Bradbury chose it to start his 2002 book Let’s All Kill Constance. According to The Phrase Finder, it has become 'the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style of fiction writing,' and has been parodied in works ranging from Phineas and Ferb to Star Trek.

Whether the phrase is truly as bad as its reputation suggests is subjective. In 1982, it inspired the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, an annual competition to craft the worst opening sentence for an imaginary novel. However, in 2013, American Book Review ranked Bulwer-Lytton’s full 58-word sentence as #22 on their list of the 100 best opening lines, placing him between James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. Some argue that Bulwer-Lytton’s prose is unfairly maligned: in 2013, statistician Mikhail Simkin created a quiz asking participants to distinguish between sentences by Bulwer-Lytton and Dickens. Simkin claims that the average person can only identify the correct author about 48 percent of the time.

For those who remain critical of the sentence, consider that it could have been far worse. If Schulz had chosen a line from deeper within Paul Clifford’s opening chapter, Snoopy might have spent decades typing something like this:

“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.”

Perhaps 'It was a dark and stormy night' isn’t so terrible after all.