Paul Clifford

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Paul Clifford

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was born in London in 1803, the youngest son of a general. He had his first published work at the age of seventeen, Ishmael: An Oriental Tale, With Other Poems. In 1823, while still studying at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he published Delmour; or, A Tale of a Sylphid, and Other Poems.

In 1828, he rose to popularity with Pelham, a tale of dandyism that focused on the manners, habits and lifestyles of fashionable figures of the period. In 1830 Paul Clifford was published. The work has been considered a precedent for the ‘Newgate novel’, a controversial sub-genre of the crime novel of the mid nineteenth century, in which the criminal was hero. By 1833 Bulwer-Lytton had reached the height of his popularity with Godolphin, followed by The Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834), The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Rienzi: Last of the Tribunes (1835) and Harold: Last of the Saxon Kings (1848).

In addition to his writing, Bulwer-Lytton also pursued a political career, serving in Parliament, as a Whig Radical for eleven years from 1831 and later as a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1852 to 1866, when he entered the Lords as Baron Lytton. He served as Secretary of State for the Colonies during the 1850s, when towns were named after him in British Columbia and Australia.

Bulwer-Lytton continued to publish widely until his death in 1873; he is buried in St Edmund’s Chapel, near Poets’ Corner, in Westminster Abbey.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON

Paul Clifford

BookishMall.com

BookishMall.com

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2010

Published in Pocket Penguin Classics 2010

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193294-1

Many of your lordships must recollect what used to take place on the high roads in the neighbourhood of this metropolis some years ago. Scarcely a carriage could pass without being robbed; and frequently the passengers were obliged to fight with, and give battle to, the highwaymen who infested the roads.

Duke of Wellington, speech on the Metropolis Police Bill, 5 June 1829

Can any man doubt whether it is better to be a great statesman or a common thief?

Jonathan Wild

Chapter I

Say, ye opprest 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 ye 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 housetops, 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 thinks, 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 mayn’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 white-washed, 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 embellishment 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 villainous 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 æquis, 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 bed-side 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 grey 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.