Opening Line: Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found here. 

A reader request:

Request: You mentioned, back in the Opening Lines index post, that you might be open to the idea of doing some bad literature. So how about the quintessential bad opening line? It was a dark and stormy night. Could be fun.

In his essay on Yeats, T.S. Eliot observed: 'One of the most thrilling lines in King Lear is the simple, "Never, never, never, never, never," but apart f...