


Produced by Pat Castevens and David Widger





THE CAXTONS

(Complete)

A FAMILY PICTURE

By Edward Bulwer Lytton

(Lord Lytton)




PREFACE.

If it be the good fortune of this work to possess any interest for the
Novel reader, that interest, perhaps, will be but little derived from
the customary elements of fiction. The plot is extremely slight, the
incidents are few, and with the exception of those which involve the
fate of Vivian, such as may be found in the records of ordinary life.

Regarded as a Novel, this attempt is an experiment somewhat apart from
the previous works of the author. It is the first of his writings in
which Humor has been employed, less for the purpose of satire than in
illustration of amiable characters; it is the first, too, in which man
has been viewed, less in his active relations with the world, than in
his repose at his own hearth,--in a word, the greater part of the canvas
has been devoted to the completion of a simple Family Picture. And thus,
in any appeal to the sympathies of the human heart, the common household
affections occupy the place of those livelier or larger passions
which usually (and not unjustly) arrogate the foreground in Romantic
composition.

In the Hero whose autobiography connects the different characters and
events of the work, it has been the Author's intention to imply the
influences of Home upon the conduct and career of youth; and in the
ambition which estranges Pisistratus for a time from the sedentary
occupations in which the man of civilized life must usually serve his
apprenticeship to Fortune or to Fame, it is not designed to describe
the fever of Genius conscious of superior powers and aspiring to high
destinies, but the natural tendencies of a fresh and buoyant mind,
rather vigorous than contemplative, and in which the desire of action is
but the symptom of health.

Pisistratus in this respect (as he himself feels and implies) becomes
the specimen or type of a class the numbers of which are daily
increasing in the inevitable progress of modern civilization. He is
one too many in the midst of the crowd; he is the representative of the
exuberant energies of youth, turning, as with the instinct of nature for
space and development, from the Old World to the New. That which may be
called the interior meaning of the whole is sought to be completed by
the inference that, whatever our wanderings, our happiness will
always be found within a narrow compass, and amidst the objects more
immediately within our reach, but that we are seldom sensible of this
truth (hackneyed though it be in the Schools of all Philosophies) till
our researches have spread over a wider area. To insure the blessing of
repose, we require a brisker excitement than a few turns up and down our
room. Content is like that humor in the crystal, on which Claudian has
lavished the wonder of a child and the fancies of a Poet,--

           "Vivis gemma tumescit aquis."

                         E. B. L.

October, 1849.




THE CAXTONS.




PART I.




CHAPTER I.

"Sir--sir, it is a boy!"

"A boy," said my father, looking up from his book, and evidently much
puzzled: "what is a boy?"

Now my father did not mean by that interrogatory to challenge
philosophical inquiry, nor to demand of the honest but unenlightened
woman who had just rushed into his study, a solution of that mystery,
physiological and psychological, which has puzzled so many curious
sages, and lies still involved in the question, "What is man?" For as we
need not look further than Dr. Johnson's Dictionary to know that a boy
is "a male child,"--i.e., the male young of man,--so he who would go to
the depth of things, and know scientifically what is a boy, must be able
to ascertain "what is a man." But for aught I know, my father may have
been satisfied with Buffon on that score, or he may have sided with
Monboddo. He may have agreed with Bishop Berkeley; he may have
contented himself with Professor Combe; he may have regarded the genus
spiritually, like Zeno, or materially, like Epicurus. Grant that boy is
the male young of man, and he would have had plenty of definitions to
choose from. He might have said, "Man is a stomach,--ergo, boy a male
young stomach. Man is a brain,--boy a male young brain. Man is a bundle
of habits,--boy a male young bundle of habits. Man is a machine,--boy
a male young machine. Man is a tail-less monkey,--boy a male young
tail-less monkey. Man is a combination of gases,--boy a male young
combination of gases