HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY

A very nice review of The World and His Wife in the Historical Novel Society journal.

The World and His Wife

Written by Stephen Wyatt
Review by Katherine Mezzacappa

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), writer and politician, was commercially very successful in his lifetime. Originating the expressions “the great unwashed,” “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and more, he inadvertently provided the inspiration for Bovril. He is barely known now, yet anyone who reads this novel charting his disastrous marriage to Rosina Wheeler, and their long years of acrimonious separation, may be tempted to try Paul Clifford or Eugene Aram.

The war played out more or less publicly between the Lyttons is told by two “unreliable” narrators. Rosina’s voice is spirited and vengeful, with a range of inventive epithets for her estranged husband: my favorites were Fopling Windbag and Bullfrog Littlewit, and I loved phrases like “he had become such a literary threshing machine, that he could not stop emptying his withered bales on to the market.” Edward is self-pitying, justifying both his infidelities and his physical attacks on Rosina. Early in the marriage, as Edward makes love to Rosina, he thinks not of her but plots out a novel. Later, an attempt at reconciliation through a journey to Italy is doomed when Edward’s mistress and her complaisant husband come along too. Edward eventually resorts to that stratagem of the Victorian husband with an inconvenient wife, and commits her to an asylum, advising his friend Charles Dickens to threaten his blameless Catherine with the same if she does not agree to a separation on his terms.

Wyatt plunges the reader convincingly into the world of Victorian literati: Disraeli, the elder Fanny Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and Harrison Ainsworth all get a mention. The only false note was a reference to the dog of Pompeii; those casts were made thirty years later. But this account of the peculiar hell of an unhappy Victorian marriage is an exhilarating read.