Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, PC was an English writer and politician. He served as a Whig MP from 1831 to 1841 and a Conservative MP from 1851 to 1866. He was Secretary of State for the Colonies from June 1858 to June 1859, when he chose Richard Clement Moody to be founder of British Columbia. He declined the Crown of Greece in 1862 after the abdication of King Otto. He became Baron Lytton of Knebworth in 1866. His son, the statesman Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, served as Governor-General of India and British Ambassador to France, and wrote poetry under the pseudonym Owen Meredith. Bulwer-Lytton's works were highly popular and paid him well. He coined the phrases "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", and "dweller on the threshold". Then came a sharp decline in his reputation, so that he is known today for little more than the opening seven words of his novel Paul Clifford : "It was a dark and stormy night". The sardonic Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest seeks the "opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels".
