The Disowned (Bulwer-Lytton)
Bulwer-Lytton is a guilty pleasure for me; he's nowhere near as good a writer as some of his Victorian contemporaries, but I love his silly, pompous coinages based on Latin and Greek roots, and if you just go with the flow when he goes off on some lengthy philosophical or moral tangent, sometimes what he has to say can be quite interesting. However, now and again, he goes off into a rabbit-hole of one of his own philosophical enthusiasms to the immediate detriment of the story at hand.
The Disowned (1828) is apparently Bulwer's 3rd novel, well before he reached the height of his popularity. In it, we already see his liking for the atmospheric night-time scene (he has a fairly memorable one in which the co-protagonists of his story take a night-time stroll, discuss matters of life and death, and one of them, who has been experiencing premonitions of his death all evening, is murdered - in mistake for a prominent politician).
The novel noticeably lacks coherent structure, and its title character, the disowned Clarence (of course he is eventually restored) is a bit insipid compared to the various alternate versions of masculinity (the intensely moral Algernon Mordaunt, the revolutionary Wolfe, the self-interested fraudster Crauford, the carefree Cole - "old King Cole", first discovered living with gypsies, but then later retired to upper middle class life) who surround him, and in the case of Mordaunt entirely usurp the narrative for chapters on end. The female characters are not fully realized, serving pretty much as mere repositories for the emotions &/or priorities of their menfolk. In fact, you could argue that Mordaunt's wife exists for the sole purpose of expiring from famine, as a consequence of her husband's stern morality (he refuses to take part in Crauford's fraudulent schemes).
If you're up for an episodic tale that involves all classes of English society in the 1820s, and has a fair amount of incident (a duel, a murder, an execution, to name a few), and a spooky moment or two, told in good if occasionally quirky English, you can do worse than Bulwer Lytton.
