Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Newfoundlands
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803 – 1873) was one of the more prominent English writers of the 19th Century, producing plays, poems, and short fiction, though he was best known for his novels. He also had a significant political career. Very popular in his time, Bulwer-Lytton is probably best known now for beginning one of his novels with the sentence "It was a dark and stormy night," which inspired the creation of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening sentence of a novel.
Bulwer-Lytton explicitly mentions Newfoundlands in two of his novels: My Novel (1853) and Alice, or The Mysteries (1873), both briefly discussed here at The Cultured Newf.
An earlier novel, Pelham (1828), references a dog that appears to be an allusion to Bulwer-Lewis' own Newfoundland, though the breed of the dog in that novel is never specified. Early in that novel one of the characters is passing through a churchyard when suddenly "I saw a man suddenly rise from the earth, where he appeared to have been lying; he stood still for a moment, and then (evidently not perceiving me) raised his clasped hands to heaven, and muttered some words I was not able distinctly to hear. As I approached nearer to him, which I did with no very pleasant sensations, a large black dog, which, till then had remained couchant, sprang towards me with a loud growl. . . . I was too terrified to move . . . and I should most infallibly have been converted into dog's meat, if our mutual acquaintance had not started from his reverie, called his dog by the very appropriate name of Terror, and then, slouching his hat over his face, passed rapidly by me, dog and all. I did not recover the fright for an hour and a quarter." (p. 26, Cassell (NY) edition, 1848?)
The dog is mentioned again when the dog's owner recounts a trip he took throughout England:
...after I had stayed some weeks with my mother and sister, I took advantage of their departure for the Continent, and resolved to make a tour through England. Rich people, and I have always been very rich, grow exceedingly tired of the embarrassment of their riches. I seized with delight at the idea of travelling without carriages and servants ; I took merely a favorite horse, and the black dog, poor Terror, which you see now at my feet. (323)
We know these two mentions of a large black dog named Terror are references, if indirect, to Bulwer-Lytton's own Newfoundland. In his biography of Bulwer-Lytton, The Life of Lord Lytton, T. H. S. Escott makes the following remark about Edward Bulwer-Lytton's older brother William:
William Bulwer, something of an artist as well as of a poet, drew a pencil sketch at this time of his brother and sister-in-law, with, at their side, two dogs, one a King Charles spaniel of the Blenheim breed, the other a huge black Newfoundland answering to the name of "Terror," and then about to be immortalized in Bulwerian fiction as the original of Glanville's constant four-legged companion, who in Pelham terrifies by his loud growl the Virgil-quoting peer Vincent." (p. 136, Routledge (London), 1910).
Regrettably, I have so far been unable to find an image of that pencil sketch.
Bulwer-Lytton's ownership of Terror is also briefly mentioned in Eleanor Lewis' Famous Pets of Famous People (1892).