“It was a dark and stormy night.” That literary cliché of an opening sentence, regarded as the qualitative antithesis to Jane Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” and popularized by the cartoon character Snoopy, is all that most of the modern world recognizes of the work of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It was even the inspiration for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, to find the opening sentence of the worst possible novel.