Description

In this Novel of Night and Morning I have had various ends in view -- subordinate, I grant, to the higher and more durable morality which belongs to the Ideal, and instructs us playfully while it interests, in the passions, and through the heart. First -- to deal fearlessly with that universal unsoundness in social justice which makes distinctions so marked and iniquitous between Vice and Crime -- viz., between the corrupting habits and the violent act -- which scarce touches the former with the lightest twig in the fasces -- which lifts against the latter the edge of the Lictor's axe. Let a child steal an apple in sport, let a starveling steal a roll in despair, and Law conducts them to the Prison, for evil commune to mellow them for the gibbet. But let a man spend one apprenticeship from youth to old age in vice -- let him devote a fortune, perhaps colossal, to the wholesale demoralization of his kind -- and he may be surrounded with the adulation of the so-called virtuous, and be served upon its knee, by that Lackey -- the Modern World! -- EDWARD GEORGE BULWER-LYTTON, Knebworth, 1845