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it was a dark and stormy night

 


There is a general impression that the sentence "it was a dark and stormy night" is a laughably bad way to start a novel.

This impression is advanced by the Edward Bulwer-Lytton award for the best/worst deliberately bad sentence and by our collective memory of Snoopy, with his typewriter on top of the doghouse, typing exactly those words. 

The novel that starts that way (sort of) is Bulwer-Lytton's PAUL CLIFFORD (1830). 

I saw "sort of" because there is no period at the end of the word "night." Snoopy puts a period there. People quote THAT as if it were a laughably bad sentence. It isn't. That alone would be a fine terse mood-setting sentence. Edgar Allen Poe used exactly those words, with a period at the end, in a story he wrote one year later. 

The actual sentence Bulwer-Lytton wrote, though, was:   "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 housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."  

Now THAT is laughably over-written. And I suspect most readers even when this was just off the press experienced the parenthetical comment as jarring.  Why should the sweeping of the wind up the streets call out "for it is in London..."? Doesn't wind sweep up streets pretty much everywhere? The location of that meta-address to the reader is utterly arbitrary. 

In general, yes, a lousy start to a novel. But not the one bit everyone quotes as such.  

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  1. HenryJune 20, 2023 at 6:14 AM

    It is informative that a night is stormy, but aren't all nights dark? Perhaps Bulwer-Lytton's line inspired George Carlin's hippy dippy weatherman to say, “Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning.”

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    1. ChristopherJune 21, 2023 at 11:43 PM

      Some nights are darker than others. Stormy nights generally have clouds hiding the moon and the stars, deepening the darkness. But also stormy nights generally have wind and rain, so the short phrase that ends with "night" would have been enough to suggest everything the rest of the sentence strains to tell us!

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