Credit to Barry Popik

[Shapiro, Fred]

In the latest issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine my regular column on quotations discusses, among several other quotations, "it was a dark and stormy night."  I credit Barry Popik there for the discovery that this phrase was used as an opening line of stories before Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 usage that is usually said to be the origin.

Fred Shapiro

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org