Pelham Author:Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE THE EDITION OF 1840. The holiday time of life, in which this novel was written, while accounting, perhaps in a certain gaiety of tone, for the popu... more »larity it has received, may perhaps also excuse, in some measure, its more evident deficiencies and faults. Although I trust the time has passed when it might seem necessary to protest against those critical assumptions which so long confounded the author with the hero; — although I equally trust that, even were such assumptions true, it would be scarcely necessary to dispute the justice of visiting upon later and more sobered life, the supposed foibles and levities of that thoughtless age of eighteen, in which this fiction was first begun,— yet, perhaps, some short sketch of the origin of a work, however idle, the success of which determined the literary career of the author, may not be considered altogether presumptuous or irrev4fent. 1. '. While, yet, then a boy in years, but with some experience of the world, which I entered prematurely, Vii., in the first collected edition of the Autb ir'i prose works. I had the good fortune to be confined to my room by a severe illness, towards the end of a London season. All my friendd were out of town, and I was left to such resources as solitude can suggest to the tedium of sickness. T amused myself by writing with incredible difficulty and labor (for till then prose was a country almost as unknown to myself as to Monsieur Jourdain) some half a dozen tales and sketches. Among them was a story called " Mortimer, or the Memoirs of a Gentleman." Its commencement was almost word for word the same as that of " Pelham;" but the design was exactly opposite to that of the latter and later work. "Mortimer" was intended to show the manner in which the world deteriorates its votary...« less