Falkland

Falkland, by E. B. Lytton,
Complete

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#188 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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Title: Falkland, Complete
Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Release Date: March 2005 [EBook #7761] [Yes, we are more than one

year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 27, 2003]
Edition: 10
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FALKLAND,
BY LYTTON ***

This eBook was produced by David Widger

FALKLAND
By Edward Bulwer-Lytton

PREFATORY NOTE TO THE PRESENT EDITION.
"FALKLAND" is the earliest of Lord Lytton's prose fictions. Published
before "Pelham," it was written in the boyhood of its illustrious author.
In the maturity of his manhood and the fulness of his literary popularity
he withdrew it from print. This is one of the first English editions of his
collected works in which the tale reappears. It is because the morality
of it was condemned by his experienced judgment, that the author of
"Falkland" deliberately omitted it from each of the numerous reprints
of his novels and romances which were published in England during
his lifetime.
With the consent of the author's son, "Falkland" is included in the
present edition of his collected works.
In the first place, this work has been for many years, and still is,

accessible to English readers in every country except England. The
continental edition of it, published by Baron Tauchnitz, has a wide
circulation; and since for this reason the book cannot practically be
withheld from the public, it is thought desirable that the publication of
it should at least be accompanied by some record of the
abovementioned fact.
In the next place, the considerations which would naturally guide an
author of established reputation in the selection of early compositions
for subsequent republication, are obviously inapplicable to the
preparation of a posthumous standard edition of his collected works.
Those who read the tale of "Falkland" eight-and-forty years ago' have
long survived the age when character is influenced by the literature of
sentiment. The readers to whom it is now presented are not Lord
Lytton's contemporaries; they are his posterity. To them his works have
already become classical. It is only upon the minds of the young that
the works of sentiment have any appreciable moral influence. But the
sentiment of each age is peculiar to itself; and the purely moral
influence of sentimental fiction seldom survives the age to which it was
first addressed. The youngest and most impressionable reader of such
works as the "Nouvelle Hemise," "Werther," "The Robbers,"
"Corinne," or "Rene," is not now likely to be morally influenced, for
good or ill, by the perusal of those masterpieces of genius. Had Byron
attained the age at which great authors most realise the responsibilities
of fame and genius, he might possibly have regretted, and endeavoured
to suppress, the publication of "Don Juan;" but the possession of that
immortal poem is an unmixed benefit to posterity, and the loss of it
would have been an irreparable misfortune.
"Falkland," although the earliest, is one of the most carefully finished
of its author's compositions. All that was once turbid, heating,
unwholesome in the current of sentiment which flows through this
history of a guilty passion, "Death's immortalising winter" has chilled
and purified. The book is now a harmless, and, it may be hoped, a not
uninteresting, evidence of the precocity of its author's genius. As such,
it is here reprinted.

[It was published in 1827]

FALKLAND.
BOOK I.
FROM ERASMUS FALKLAND, ESQ., TO THE HON. FREDERICK
MONKTON.
L---, May --, 1822.
You are mistaken, my dear Monkton! Your description of the gaiety of
"the season" gives me no emotion. You speak of pleasure; I remember
no labour so wearisome; you enlarge upon its changes; no sameness
appears to me so monotonous. Keep, then, your pity for those who
require it. From the height of my philosophy I