Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron Lytton (1803–1873)

This is a bit of Victorian nonsense of which one can only be grateful that it is relatively short by the period's standards. It is ostensibly the tale of an apparent utopia deep underground.

Like all such efforts, utopia turns out to be a little more dystopian with every passing intelligent thought and the cause of much didactic heavy duty satire on current conditions (those of the 1870s).

Bulwer-Lytton is not a great writer but he has a dry and detached aristocratic sense of humour that makes show more this a surprisingly easy read even if nothing much happens.

It stays in the library because of its insights into the mentality of the mid-Victorian upper class male and its subsequent influence in cultural history is well outlined in Matthew Sweet's introduction.

There could be an essay here into that mentality but we would fall into that same didactic trap of the author's - but what we do pick up is suspicion of democracy and a genuine fear of female power.

The attitude to women - indistinguishable as Vril-ya from the sort of angel who surmounted Victorian gravestones - is creepy. The hero's penchant for a sixteen year old 'angel' is duly noted. Hmmmmmmm!

There is even a rather counter-intuitive (to us) view of child labour that may be amusing now but is less so when one considers the undertone of reaction to relatively recent liberal-minded legislation.

Still, Bulwer-Lytton was nearly 70 when he wrote this and his reactionary stance derives from his late transition from Whiggery to Conservatism and a rather obvious suspicion of excitable reformism.

The Vril-ya are so like the ideal of Republican Rome that the book might be regarded as an unconscious manifesto for an aristocratic republicanism threatened with submersion into democracy.

It is certainly one of those books which must be read by anyone interested in the early history of 'speculative fiction' (aka 'science fiction').

Most famously, Bulwer-Lytton raises the political problems and possibilities raised by what would later be our nuclear destructive capacity a full seventy five years before it actually appeared.

Bulwer-Lytton is also the unwitting father of the underground tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, of tales of apocalyptic threat from superior races and of Nazi UFOS in the hollow earth - so he cannot be all bad. show less

In this novel, an itinerant American man discovers a secret civilization, much older than humanity, hidden beneath the surface of the Earth. I say "novel," but really it's an extended description; aside from the beginning and the end, there's very little incident. What is there, though, is a description of a strange and unusual civilization, that of the Vril-ya, in some ways superior to that of Victorian Britain, and in some ways an inversion of it. The most interesting part is definitely show more the way gender is constructed in Vril-ya society, where women do the intellectual work, as well as the romantic pursuit. The narrator (anonymous of course) is never able to come to terms with this; he's obviously attracted to the women for their forthrightness and flirtatiousness (and them to him!), but he wants them to stop doing it, and act like the meek and demure women he's used to. There's also a lot of evolutionary and imperial anxieties here; the Vril-ya contain massive destructive power within their very bodies, and he both wants the power for himself and fears that the Vril-ya will use it for themselves. Which they wouldn't, they have no reason to, but he just can't see that, either.

Where Bulwer does seem to identify with his narrator, though, is that the primary argument against having such a perfect civilization is that you wouldn't have drama, literature, or art anymore-- because without struggle, what would all that be about? The rest of the novel makes it hard to trust his conclusions, and his hangup comes across as a bit facile, and not the damning indictment it seems to want to be. I found this whole line of argument a little hard to parse, but intriguing.

On the other hand, the bits describing the etymology of the Vril-ya language are just boring. show less

This is a richly written early 19th century novel. While the setting is suitably dramatic as per the title, the actual events of the impending eruption of Vesuvius and destruction of Pompeii are very much in the background, against the central plot of the rivalry between the Egyptian priest Arbaces and the Greek Glaucus over the same woman, Ione. Another priest Apaceides (who has converted to Christianity) is murdered by Arbaces and Glaucus is framed it. About to face a hungry lion in the show more arena, he is only saved by the apocalypse itself. This novel is very melodramatic and theatrical to the modern reader, but I enjoyed its richness, despite some occasional overlong digressions - though even these had their poignancy when compared to the ruins found in recent times. show less

This is a very effective short ghost story about a haunted house in the middle of London, the typical place where no tenant has served out their term and all quitted after a day or two. The author builds up an atmosphere of thick horror and oppression very well within a few pages - "I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life". The narrator is determined to show more find the true rational explanation for the hauntings as he refuses to believe in the supernatural and, in the end, he does identify the source, but it is based on a Medieval monkish curse. A gripping piece of writing. show less