The evening before the publication of Pelham, Bulwer was known only as a clever man of fashion; before another sun had set he was the founder of a new school of romance. In his first essay, Falkland, he had shewn a desire to unite the passionate imaginative style with the personal philosophic, more after the fashion of Godwin than of Fielding. In Pelham he discovered that his true vocation was an analysis of the philosophy of aristocratic life. Like Fielding, he brought to his task the experience of feeling and of thought, in addition to a keenness and closeness of observation, such as Moliere shews in his satiric comedies. The last quality procured for the novel the designation of the manual of dandyism ; it was quoted by a herd as Mussulmans quote the Koran, or Popes the decrees of the Council of Trent. What was rather more provoking was, that the great hulk of readers resolved to regard this picture of the aristocracy, not as such a portraiture as Juvenal or Moliere would have drawn, but as a very serious code of laws for obtaining that state of exclusiveness and indifference which court poets and philosophers from the days of Augustus to those of William IV. have described as the consummation of human enjoyment;

Not to admire is all the art I know;
To make men happy, and to keep them so.

Such readers have condemned the episode of Sir Reginald Glanville as an impertinence, and, sooth to say, the adventures with which he is connected seem to us inconsistent with the proper object of the work. Its design was to show the means by which “exclusive elegance” might be attained, with a philosophic appreciation of the worth of such a state.- When first the work was projected, it was on the cards that Pelham should have been to dandyism what Don Quixote is to chivalry, but the author “changed his hand and checked his pride,” and has left to Mrs. Gore the office of Cervantes to the aristocracy.

There are those who regard Pelham as a national rather than a fashionable portraiture ; but England has no national school of romance, such as is possessed by the Scotch, but more especially by the Irish. It is usual to attribute this to the more poetic temperament of our brethren in “the land of the west,” but it arises from extrinsic circumstances. There is in Ireland a perfect separation of parties and castes, which permits the peculiarities of each to be developed ; feudalism is not yet extinct, the serf and the suzerain may still be seen in broad contrast; the very best of the vassals display some portion of the cunning that belongs to slavery, and the very worst retains some of the lightsome gaiety ever manifested by those who have nothing to lose; among the lords, too, there is none so good as not to let the pride of ascendancy peep out at some time in an offensive shape, and none so bad as to forget that it is occasionally necessary to mollify the haughtiness of caste.

From: Court magazine, and monthly critic. Vol. 10, Nr. 6 (1837)