Childhood and genius

Childhood and genius have the same master-organ in common — inquisitiveness.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The meaning of the quote

In 1884, when Albert Einstein was 5 years old, his father handed him a small compass, and he turned it over and over, watching the needle swing back to the same direction no matter which way he turned. He said decades later that the wonder of it never wore off.

That’s the trait Edward Bulwer-Lytton pointed to when he wrote about inquisitiveness as the one thing childhood and genius share. A 5-year-old doesn’t need a reason to ask why a needle always points the same way. A grown mind that never lost the habit of asking is what most people end up calling genius.

The line comes from The Caxtons, Bulwer-Lytton’s 1849 novel about three generations of one English family. In the passage, the narrator argues that a child’s mind runs on the same instinct that drives a genius’ mind, so let a child chase its questions the way it already wants to, and it might land somewhere close to what genius finds.

Marie Curie kept that same habit well past childhood, spending years testing pitchblende ore in a leaky shed in Paris, not for pay but because she wanted to know what was making it glow. That curiosity eventually won her two Nobel Prizes, one in physics and one in chemistry, the only person in history to manage both in two different sciences.

Most people lose that pull somewhere between kindergarten and their first performance review. School rewards having the right answer over chasing an interesting question, and most jobs run the same way, so asking “why” out loud as an adult can look like you don’t know what you’re doing. The habit doesn’t disappear so much as get trained out of people who had it for free at 5. Genius, by that measure, isn’t a bigger brain, but whatever is left of that habit once everyone else has been talked out of it.

About the author

In 1827, Edward Bulwer-Lytton married a woman his mother despised, so she cut off his money completely. A man who’d grown up wealthy suddenly had to write for a living or not eat, and he chose to write. His novel Pelham came out the following year and made him one of the most talked-about writers in England.

His father died when Edward was 4. Years later, as a young man, he fell for a woman who married someone else and then died. Both losses landed before he’d built anything of his own to fall back on.

Pelham made him a literary celebrity in his mid-20s. He followed it with Paul Clifford in 1830, then The Last Days of Pompeii in 1834 and Rienzi in 1835, the last two popular enough to be turned into operas, including one by Richard Wagner.

He also had a knack for lines that outlived the books they came from. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is his, from the play Richelieu. So is “the great unwashed” and “the pursuit of the almighty dollar.”

His influence reached other writers too. He talked Charles Dickens into rewriting the ending of Great Expectations, swapping a bleak final scene for the more hopeful one most readers know today.

Paul Clifford is also where things went wrong for his reputation. Its opening line, about a dark and stormy night with rain falling in torrents, became such a byword for melodrama that a professor built an entire contest around it in 1982, inviting writers to submit the worst possible opening sentence for an imaginary novel. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest ran for more than 40 years before its founder retired it for good in 2024.

He spent much of his life in Parliament too, and served as Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1858 to 1859. His later novel Vril: The Power of the Coming Race imagined a superior race powered by a mysterious energy source called vril. A food company later borrowed the word for a beef extract and called it Bovril.

His marriage didn’t survive his rise. He and his wife, Rosina, separated in 1833 and divorced in 1836, then spent years attacking each other in public. At one point he had her committed to an asylum after she denounced him at a political event. Public pressure got her released.

By the time he wrote The Caxtons in 1849, the semi-autobiographical novel where the line about childhood and genius appears, Bulwer-Lytton was one of the best-known writers in England. He died in 1873 from complications after ear surgery and was buried in Westminster Abbey, despite having asked not to be.

Resources

• The Caxtons (Book)
• Paul Clifford (Book)
• Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It (Book)
• The Caxtons, full text (Website)
• Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (Website)
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Wikipedia)