Lucretia

Lucretia, by Edward-Bulwer
Lytton, Complete

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Title: Lucretia, Complete
Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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LUCRETIA
by Edward Bulwer Lytton

PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1853.
"Lucretia; or, The Children of Night," was begun simultaneously with
"The Caxtons: a Family Picture." The two fictions were intended as
pendants; both serving, amongst other collateral aims and objects, to
show the influence of home education, of early circumstance and
example, upon after character and conduct. "Lucretia" was completed
and published before "The Caxtons." The moral design of the first was
misunderstood and assailed; that of the last was generally
acknowledged and approved: the moral design in both was nevertheless
precisely the same. But in one it was sought through the darker side of
human nature; in the other through the more sunny and cheerful: one
shows the evil, the other the salutary influences, of early circumstance
and training. Necessarily, therefore, the first resorts to the tragic
elements of awe and distress, --the second to the comic elements of
humour and agreeable emotion. These differences serve to explain the

different reception that awaited the two, and may teach us how little the
real conception of an author is known, and how little it is cared for; we
judge, not by the purpose he conceives, but according as the
impressions he effects are pleasurable or painful. But while I cannot
acquiesce in much of the hostile criticism this fiction produced at its
first appearance, I readily allow that as a mere question of art the story
might have been improved in itself, and rendered more acceptable to
the reader, by diminishing the gloom of the catastrophe. In this edition I
have endeavoured to do so; and the victim whose fate in the former cast
of the work most revolted the reader, as a violation of the trite but
amiable law of Poetical Justice, is saved from the hands of the Children
of Night. Perhaps, whatever the faults of this work, it equals most of its
companions in the sustainment of interest, and in that coincidence
between the gradual development of motive or passion, and the
sequences of external events constituting plot, which mainly
distinguish the physical awe of tragedy from the coarse horrors of
melodrama. I trust at least that I shall now find few readers who will
not readily acknowledge that the delineation of crime has only been
employed for the grave and impressive purpose which brings it within
the due province of the poet,--as an element of terror and a warning to
the heart.
LONDON, December 7.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
It is somewhere about four years since I appeared before the public as
the writer of a fiction, which I then intimated would probably be my
last; but bad habits are stronger than good intentions. When Fabricio, in
his hospital, resolved upon abjuring the vocation of the Poet, he was, in
truth, recommencing his desperate career by a Farewell to the Muses,--
I need not apply the allusion.
I must own, however, that there had long been a desire in my mind to
trace, in some work or other, the strange and secret ways through which
that Arch-ruler of Civilization, familiarly called "Money," insinuates
itself into our thoughts and motives, our hearts and actions; affecting
those who undervalue as those who overestimate its importance;

ruining virtues in the spendthrift no less than engendering vices in the
miser. But when I half implied my farewell to the character of a
novelist, I had imagined that this conception might be best