Eugene Aram was first published in three volumes in 1832 by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. The novel is a romanticised and melodramatic retelling of the real life events in the eighteenth century surrounding the trial of scholar and later murderer, Eugene Aram. The Yorkshire man was a great autodidact, who mastered Greek, Latin and Hebrew while working as a schoolmaster at Netherdale and later, when he worked in Piccadilly, he taught himself Arabic and Chaldee. Aram travelled across England for a number of years and managed to accumulate a great quantity of information intended for a work on etymology based on a comparative Lexicon of the English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Celtic Languages. One of his significant understandings as a philologist was the recognition that the Celtic language was related to other European languages, which was not accepted by other scholars during that period. It was not until the publication of J. C. Prichard’s book Eastern Origin of the Celtic Traditions in 1831 that it was firmly established that the Celtic language belonged to the Indo-European language family He was also aware, again unacknowledged by contemporary philologists, that Latin was not derived from Greek. However, in the novel Bulwer-Lytton focuses on the period in Aram’s life leading up to his trial for the murder of his close friend Daniel Clark.
In 1734 Aram became a schoolmaster in Knaresborough, where he remained until 1745, the year his intimate friend Clark suddenly disappeared. The missing man had recently received a vast quantity of goods from some tradesmen and suspicion quickly fell upon Aram. Though his garden was searched and some of the goods were found there, the authorities did not have enough evidence to charge Aram and he soon after left for London. It was not until more than a decade later, when the remains of a body were found, that suspicion again fell on Aram and he was arrested for murder. Bulwer-Lytton presents Aram as a Romantic figure, prone to outbursts of violence while possessing great visionary power and ability. Bulwer-Lytton is not the only literary figure inspired by Aram’s story; the poet Thomas Hood wrote the ballad The Dream of Eugene Aram, which attempts to contrast the protagonist’s intellectual pursuits with his murderous desires, while George Orwell and P. G. Wodehouse both reference Aram in their work.