Paul Clifford

A boy raised in a tavern becomes a gentleman of the road, and the novel's real target is the bench that will one day try him: Bulwer-Lytton wrote it to argue that England hanged the poor for what it forgave in the rich. It opens with the seven words he never lived down — It was a dark and stormy night — and it helped change the criminal law it mocked. Sixty plates of painting from 1728 to 1850, including Gainsborough and Delacroix, gather the road, the tavern, and the shore into a single gallery of the highwayman's world.