rain's pouring and the thunder's drumming it's dark and darker still ooh, ooh, it goes dark

This over-descriptive and melodramatic style was popular in Bulwer-Lytton’s time. Why is “a dark and stormy night” such a famous line? 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). It’s the beginning-in particular the first seven words-that’ve stuck with the literati, however.įor one, it’s 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). The twist at the end is that the robber frees himself and marries his cousin in America. The rest of the novel goes on to tell the dark tale of a robber who doesn’t know he’s the son of the judge who eventually sentences him to death. You may notice a lack of periods in that 58-word starting sentence. “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.” The English novelist, playwright, and politician Sir Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton used the line to open his 1830 book Paul Clifford. Think you can be more original? Enter ’s Scary Story Opener Writing Contest! Who wrote “it was a dark and stormy night”?Īs with nearly all sayings that are now overdone, the first “dark and stormy night” started as an earnest original. 😱 Have you got the perfect opening for a scary story?

Rain's pouring and the thunder's drumming it's dark and darker still ooh, ooh, it goes dark