A Dark and Stormy Night

 

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

 I wonder if you will recognise this. It is the opening sentence of the novel Paul Clifford, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I have just seen Bulwer-Lytton's name brought up, and the above sentence quoted, in response to the question, "Who have been the world's worst published writers?" I have not read more of Bulwer-Lytton than a few quotes such as that above, but I cannot think he really deserves to be numbered among 'the world's worst published writers'. Tellingly, the person who quoted the above did not give any reason why we are supposed to consider this such bad writing, apart from mentioning that the opening phrase is a cliché--but if it was not a cliché when Bulwer-Lytton used it, then he has the distinction of originating a cliché, which is not something that every writer can claim. 

What, apart from that, might someone find wrong with the sentence? I ask that in earnest. I have asked myself the same question. The most I can think of is this: the sentence is long, with a number of subordinate clauses. But is this really a flaw? Many people today, it would seem, think so. The principle here seems to be: writing should never be complex. Or perhaps it is only opening lines that should never be complex? There is perhaps a little too much of digression, of self-interruption, for a novel's very first line, but if so, this is a minor flaw, not deserving the kind of dubious accolades Bulwer-Lytton has received.

Supposing there is a principle of strict simplicity behind such judgements, it seems to me that principle has given birth to more bad writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than you are likely to find in all the centuries before. 

But I'm not sure that people are really much concerned with principles in these questions, so much as slogans and attitudes. I wonder if we see, in this and similar examples, a kind of inverted emperor's-new-clothes effect: the crowd point and jeer at a man they've been told is naked; in fact, he is clothed, and, if they only looked down, the mob would find themselves hardly wearing a few stitches between them.