It Was a Dark and Stormy Night on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: English novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton was born on this day in 1803. Bulwer-Lytton's works sold and paid him well. He coined famous phrases like "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "dweller on the threshold". But, his most famous line was from "Paul Clifford" whose opening phrase was, "It was a dark and stormy night."

The entire opening goes like this: "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."

"It was a dark and stormy night" is an often-mocked and parodied phrase considered to represent "the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style of fiction writing", also known as purple prose. 

The sentence is "filled with melodrama (a dramatic form that does not observe the laws of cause and effect and that exaggerates emotion and emphasizes plot or action at the expense of characterization). It’s also become the archetypical Victorian-era trope (a convention or device that establishes a predictable or stereotypical representation of a character, setting, or scenario in a creative work)." Source

Edgar Allan Poe got in on the fun as well in his 1832 short story “The Bargain Lost,”:

"It was a dark and stormy night. The rain fell in cataracts; and drowsy citizens started, from dreams of the deluge, to gaze upon the boisterous sea, which foamed and bellowed for admittance into the proud towers and marble palaces."

There is actually a Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, held annually, that claims to seek the "opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels."

If you delve further in the "Paul Clifford" novel, you will stumble upon this line as well: “This made the scene,—save that on a chair by the bedside lay a profusion of long, glossy, golden ringlets, which had been cut from the head of the sufferer when the fever had begun to mount upwards, but which, with a jealousy that portrayed the darling littleness of a vain heart, she had seized and insisted on retaining near her; and save that, by the fire, perfectly inattentive to the event about to take place within the chamber, and to which we of the biped race attach so awful an importance, lay a large gray cat, curled in a ball, and dozing with half-shut eyes, and ears that now and then denoted, by a gentle inflection, the jar of a louder or nearer sound than usual upon her lethargic senses.”

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