Ismael; An Oriental Tale with Other Poems

Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton was born on the 25th May 1803 the youngest of three sons. When he was four his father died and the family moved to London. As a child he was delicate and neurotic and failed to fit in at a number of boarding schools. However, he was academically and creatively precocious and published his first work as a teenager; ‘Ishmael with Other Poems’ in 1820. Two years later he was at Cambridge University and won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for English verse for Sculpture