The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Complete
1849
Pisistratus Caxton narrates his upbringing in a household ruled by his brilliant, maddening father Austin, a scholar so absorbed in his books that he nearly misses his son's birth, then names the boy after a Greek tyrant as if the child were an intellectual trophy. This is Victorian domesticity with a comic edge: Austin drifts through fatherhood like a somnambulist, brilliant and bumbling, while young Pisistratus absorbs both his father's wisdom and his alarming gaps in practical knowledge. When Pisistratus finally leaves the Caxton home to seek "real life", in a letter that echoes Gil Blas and Don Quixote, he carries his father's eccentric tutelage like a talisman against a world of respectable artifice. Bulwer-Lytton drew on his own troubled childhood for this warmest and most personal of his novels, creating a family portrait that influenced a generation of Victorian fiction. The book balances tender domesticity with sharp social satire, asking what it means to truly live versus merely exist in polite society.
