Originally published in Howitt's Journal (William & Mary Howitt) vol.1 #1 (01 Jan 1847).
Lucretia; or, the Children of Night. By Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. London: Saunders and Ottley.
Tue only valid excuse for guilt is ignorance. The criminal who sins against knowledge is tenfold guilty. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, therefore, is guilty of a great offence against society, and against his own reputation, in the publication of this his last work. Ignorance or inexperience he cannot plead. He is not a young man, that he should be driven on by the force of a lawless imagination; nor a poor man, that he can plead the necessity of getting his bread by any means; nor is he ignorant of the nature of right and wrong. He is, on the contrary, a man of wealth, station, knowledge, leisure, influence, talents; and he has employed these godlike gifts for the most degraded of purposes—that of corrupting and inflaming the minds of the young, the ardent, and the inexperienced. He tells us that this revolting story of crime and cruelty is true. What then? Is everything that is true to be trumpeted abroad? Are the vile and the sensual to be held aloft to the public gaze; and rather than they should not be seen, and admired, and gloated on, are they to be clothed in all the fascination which genius can give to render them alluring and full of riveting interest? Many monstrous and revolting crimes are committed, but that is no reason why a man of genius and intellect should write three volumes about them. We all know that sewers actually exist; that they undermine London; that they lie often beneath happy homes and pleasant gardens; but no one, for that reason, thinks of pumping up their pollution into private houses. It would still be impure if it were conveyed through gilded pipes into marble basins. So is it with Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton's "Children of the Night." Not all the powers of his genius nor his reputation can make them wholesome or refreshing. Like the sewers we have been speaking of, they are insalubrious; a fatal miasma breathes through them: Lucretia, in two senses, is busy with poison.
If Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton is not to be reckoned as a disciple of the French melo-dramatic school, he may now assuredly be placed at the head of a fatally popular class of literature—that of the Seven Dials and St. Giles's, For instance, after going down into the bloody charnel-house of the "Children of the Night," his readers will be prepared to relish the somewhat stronger viands of "Varney the Vampire, the Feast of Blood;" "The Old House in West Street;" "The Bloody Murders at the Old Ford," &. &c. This class of writers, hitherto scorned in good society, may now hold up their heads, for Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton is come over to help them.
An Encyclopedia of Facts, Anecdotes, Arguments, and illustrations, in support of the principles of permanent and universal Peace. By Edwin Paxton Hood. London: Charles Gilpin.
This is an excellent and a very cheap book; about three hundred pages of sound argument on a most important subject, for eighteenpence. The cost of three quarts of ale, or of half-a-dozen segars, would purchase the book;--we wish we could persuade every thinking man, and woman too, of the middle and lower classes, to study it well. Listen to what we find in one place on Influence in supporting a privileged class or monopoly:—
"The class privileges of the world have grown out of war. There is more feudalism in this day in the Constitution of England than men think of: a war-loving people must always be beneath the hoof of military despotism; a greater curse to a country cannot be conceived—it is natural that it should be so. In a nation whose general intelligence is its safeguard and protection, intelligence will be respected; in a nation whose trading interests are safeguard
and protection, trade will be respected; in a nation prone to war, fencing itself all round with the fort and the pike, and relying upon the genius of battle for protection, the warrior will be most respected. Who in England equals the warrior in honour? Seldom, oh! how seldom, is the poet or the philosopher knighted or pensioned, or honoured with the title of heraldic greatness. It is better that it should be so. Sir James Montgomery, Lord William Wordsworth, His Grace Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Duke of St. James's, could receive no higher honour from posterity; yet there is a meaning in this fact—the Sovereign of the realm is supposed to be a soldier; all your dukedoms, earldoms, baronetcies, &c. &c. have their origin in the military system.
"Monopoly of legislation, monopoly of trade, will be found to be children of war. If war were abolished and brought into disrepute, and the military man were regarded as a kind of 'Jack Ketch,' as he is in China, things would soon return to their natural level. How arrived this shameful inequality of property to so alarming a height? Whence the appalling oppression of the poor-rate? Whence the luxury, the pageantry, the magnificence of wealth? Whence that numerous class who, though rich, have neither brilliant talents nor sublime virtues? Whence the insolence and the usurpation of the rich, the legislation of wealth against poverty, and a crowd of disabilities and evils beneath which man is compelled to labour? If we ate as the reason of all these, how easy to prove that, while they are the sad fruit of the monster Sin, they are immediately caused by War! How many illustrations might be drawn from our Colonial policy! War won the colonies, and war grasps them, and the fruits of the victory are in the pockets of the children of warriors; the places of power are awarded to them; for them the jewelled tiara, and the ermine robe. Who does not perceive in the war-system, a complicated machinery, set up for the purpose of retaining in idleness the scions of titled warriors, whose names and wealth may thus be transmitted to a remote posterity?"
With one other extract we will close, again urging it upon our readers to buy this cheap eighteen-penny-worth of stern, sterling sense, of which we here give them but a small sample.
"The national debt of England, says the eloquent Rufus Stebbin, in his Oration on Peace, is at present about three thousand millions of dollars—a debt produced by war; the interest of that debt, and the parts of it already liquidated, amount to about ten times as much more. And what has England obtained for all this mighty outlay of capital? Where shall we look for the benefit which she has derived from this incalculable expense? Ask the depths of the ocean, and the sunken fleets of the Nile and Trafalgar will answer. She has gained the fame of making her lion roar on the vanquished Armada; of 'letting slip her dogs of war' upon the palmy shores of Hindostan; of giving Wellington immortality upon the plains of Waterloo: and is this all? No! she has erected monuments in Westminster Abbey to the greatest butchers of our race that ever lived; it has written poverty upon the foreheads of the majority of her labourers; it has crushed the many with burdens and taxes to honour the destroyers of our race with a name—a name which, if society understood it ought, would only render its possessor detestable and contemptible.
"We have only considered the influence of war on national prosperity. Infinitely more disastrous is it in its consequences upon private, than upon public property; and infinitely more extensive. Whole navies can better be sunk in the ocean, than the man's house be burned over his head, by an invading army. Wars add to national wealth! Wars increase national prosperity! Give me the money that has been spent in war, and I will purchase every foot of land upon the globe;—I will clothe every man, woman, and child, in an attire that kings and queens might be proud of; I will build a school-house upon every hill-side, and upon every valley in the habitable earth; I will supply that school-house with a competent teacher; I will build an academy in every town, and endow it; a college in every state, and fill it with able professors; I will crown every hill with a Church, consecrated to the promulgation of the gospel of peace; I will support in its pulpit an able teacher of righteousness;—so that on every Sabbath morning, the chime on one hill should answer to the chime on another, round the earth's broad circumference, and the voice of prayer, and the song of praise should ascend, like an universal halo, from earth to heaven; the darkness of ignorance should flee before the bright light of the sun of science: Paganism would be crushed by the fall of her temples,—shaken to their deep foundations, by the voice of Truth; War would no more stalk over the earth, trampling under his giant foot all that is beautiful and lovely beneath the sky! This is not fancy; I wish it were: it reflects on men. It is the darkest chapter in human depravity, to squander God's richest blessings on passion and lust."