Description

Lucretia; or, The Children of Night, was begun simultaneously with The Caxtons: a Family Picture. The two fictions were intended as pendants; both serving, amongst other collateral aims and objects, to show the influence of home education, of early circumstance and example, upon after character and conduct. Lucretia was completed and published before The Caxtons. The moral design of the first was misunderstood and assailed; that of the last was generally acknowledged and approved: the moral design in both was nevertheless precisely the same. But in one it was sought through the darker side of human nature; in the other through the more sunny and cheerful: one shows the evil, the other the salutary influences, of early circumstance and training. Necessarily, therefore, the first resorts to the tragic elements of awe and distress, -- the second to the comic elements of humor and agreeable emotion. EDWARD GEORGE BULWER-LYTTON, London, November 1, 1846