12 August 2020
The phrase “It was a dark and stormy night...” has become synonymous with bad and melodramatic writing. Cartoonist Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame had Snoopy habitually starting novels with this line.
12 July 1965 Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz in which Snoopy starts writing a novel with the opening line “It was a dark and stormy night.”
The line is generally understood as coming from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, the opening lines of which read:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Through one of the obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little loved by the gentlemen of the police, a man evidently of the lowest orders was wending his solitary way.
The line is so clichéd that a famous annual “bad writing” contest is named after its author, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. But this is somewhat unfair. The line was already a cliché in Bulwer-Lytton’s day, and he was having a bit of fun of it. The phrase dark and stormy night appears in numerous works that predate Bulwer-Lytton’s novel.
An early appearance is in a poem by Edward Lord Herbert published in 1665:
Our life is but a dark and stormy night,
To which sense yields a weak and glimmering light;
While wandring Man thinks he discerneth all,
By that which makes him but mistake and fall.
There is this from John Arbuthnot’s 1712 John Bull Still in His Senses: Being the Third Part of Law is a Bottomless-Pit, which incidentally, is the first appearance of the character of John Bull https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/john-bull:
Tho’ there were some that stuck out to say, that Signiora Bubonia and Jack rail’d at one another, only the better to hide an Intrigue; and, that Jack had been found with Signiora under his Cloak, carrying her home in a dark stormy Night.
Or this from Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 A Sicilian Romance:
The man replied, that on a very dark and stormy night, about a week before, two persons had come to the cottage, and desired shelter. That they were unattended, but seemed to be persons of consequence in disguise.
Or this from Edward Anderson’s poem The Sailor, published c. 1800:
Altho’ we trembling stand at every blast,
High seas arise, yet glad to move so fast;
For, as the gale increases more and more,
It wafts us quicker to our native shore,
This cheers us in the dark and stormy night,
When neither moon nor stars do give us light.
So, the opening to Bulwer-Lytton’s book may be overwritten and melodramatic, but he knew exactly what he was doing, much like those who submit entries to the contest that bears his name.
Sources:
Anderson, Edward. The Sailor. Newcastle: M. Angus and Sons, 1800?, 2. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Arbuthnot, John. John Bull Still in His Senses: Being the Third Part of Law is a Bottomless-Pit. London: John Morphew, 1712. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. Paul Clifford, vol. 1 of 3. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830, 1–2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Herbert, Edward Lord. “To His Mistress for Her True Picture.” Occasional Verses of Edward Lord Herbert. London: T.R. for Thomas Dring, 1665, 50. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Radcliffe, Ann. A Sicilian Romance, vol. 1 of 2. Dublin: B. Smith for J. Moore, 1791, 188. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Image credit: Charles Schulz, Peanuts, 12 July 1965.