The opening of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy night,” has been held up as a model of bad writing for nearly two centuries. But it’s also the opening sentence of Madeleine L’Engle’s award-winning 1962 young adult science fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time.

Apparently this was deliberate. L’Engle biographer Leonard Marcus writes, “With a wink to the reader, she chose for the opening line of A Wrinkle in Time, her most audaciously original work of fiction, that hoariest of clichés … L’Engle herself was certainly aware of the old warhorse’s literary provenance as … Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s much-maligned, much-parodied repository of Victorian purple prose, Paul Clifford.”

“To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.” — Max Beerbohm

“[These foolish remarks] show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.” — Oscar Wilde

In September 1835, Stendhal wrote on the shore of Lake Albano the initials of the women he had loved: Virginie Kubly, Angela Pietragrua, Adèle Rebuffel, Mina de Griesheim, Mélanie Guilbert, Angelina Bereyter, Alexandrine Daru, Angela Pietragrua, Matilde Dembowski, Clémentine Curial, Giulia Rinieri, and Madame Azur-Alberthe de Rubempré.

“I dreamed deeply of these names, and of the astonishing follies and stupidities they made me commit,” he wrote. “The habitual condition of my life is that of an unhappy lover.”

(From his unfinished autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard, 1890.)

Entries in the index of Charles Cotton’s 1685 translation of Montaigne’s essays:

Ancient History how far respectable
Ants Conference
Arts taught to Men by other Animals
Books, immortal Children
Chearfulness Sign of Wisdom
Chewing accounted unbecoming
Clothes unknown to many Nations
Compositions that smell of Oil and the Lamp
Convenience, none without Inconvenience
Counsel’s Strength consists in Time
Desire of gathering Riches has no Limits
Dowry, great, Ruin of Families
Dying for Fear of Death
Elephant, discovering the Cheat of his Keeper
Feet performing the Service of Hands
Fortune often coincides with Reason
Foxes judging of the Thickness of the Ice by hearing
Goats trained up to give suck to Children
Greyhound’s Imagination
Head uncovered in the Presence of the Gods, why
Hedgehogs Foreknowledge of the Wind
Hospitals for Beasts
Kings and Coblers Souls cast in the same Mold
Lice cracked with the Teeth
Life, many Ways to get rid of it
Magpie that imitated the Trumpet
Monsters, whether there are such properly
Nations that sleep and wake by Half Years
Nobility, what
Opinion gives Weight and Value to Things
Parchment Scrolls tied about the Neck of Pericles
Parents dead Bodies eaten by their Children
Pedants despised
Pleasures wheedle and caress only to strangle us
Poverty obstinate
Prince ought to be himself in the Field
Revenge against inanimate Creatures
Skin of a Man, sufficient Proof against Weather
Trees buried in Winter
Utility, public, too dearly purchased
Women are more learned than Men in Love’s Business
Word of Men, their only Tye on one another
World a Looking-Glass and Book

The full index (in three volumes) is here, here, and here. It was added after Cotton’s death; I’m not sure who composed it.

Excerpts from the index of the British literary and society journal Tatler, 1709-1711:

Age, if healthy, happy
Ancestors, their examples should excite to great and virtuous actions
Animals, a degree of gratitude owing to them that serve us
Atheist, behaviour of one in sickness
Barbers, inconveniences attending their being historians
Classics, absolutely necessary to study them
Climate, British, very inconstant
Cowards never forgive
Cunning opposed to wisdom
Duels, the danger of dying in one, represented
Earth, its inhabitants ranged under two general heads
Examination, self, advantages attending it
Fame, common, house of, described
Feet, pretty ones, a letter concerning them
Flies and free-thinkers compared
Gardens, the best not so fine as nature
Honour, temple of, can be entered only through that of Virtue
Horse, described by Homer, Virgil, Oppian, Lucan, and Pope
Janglings, matrimonial
Ladies, all women such
Laughter, the chorus of conversation
Master, how he should behave to his servants
Pedants, their veneration for Greek and Latin condemned
Peruke, a kind of index to the mind
Possession, true, consists in enjoyment
Reproof distinguished from reproach
Sloth more invincible than vice
Terrible Club, account of it
Time not to be squandered
Wisdom opposed to cunning
Women should have learning

Henry Wheatley said that the indexes “possess that admirable quality of making the consulter wish to read the book itself.” Leigh Hunt wrote, “As there is ‘a soul of goodness in things evil’ so there is a soul of humor in things dry … so an Index, like the Tatler’s, often gives us a taste of the quintessence of his humor.”

In 1886, on republishing Henry Mackenzie’s 1775 novel The Man of Feeling, University College London English professor Henry Morley underscored the book’s sentimentality by adding an “Index to Tears” that records every instance in which a character weeps — 46 occasions in less than 200 pages:

Hand bathed with tears                     27
I could only weep                          48
Tears, wrung from the heart                51
Tear stood in eye                          65
Dropped one tear, no more                  67
Tears, press-gang could scarce keep from   69
Big drops wetted gray beard                70
Moistened eye                              72
Girl wept, brother sobbed                  74
Tears gushed afresh                        75
Tears flowing without control              96

And so on. At the top he notes, “Choking, &c, not counted.”