Lytton was an enigmatic figure and several of his novels had a surprising impact on the course of history over the last century and a half. For example, The Coming Race (1871), his proto science fiction novel about a subterranean master race, is thought to have influenced the young Adolf Hitler, in addition to founding a mystical pseudo-scientific group in Germany called The Vril Society, also known as The Luminous Lodge. He also personally funded experiments into paranormal and supernatural psychic phenomena. More recently his subterranean master race emerged in the 2018 science fiction film Iron Sky : The Coming Race, featuring a hideously deformed but still alive Adolf Hitler.

He was buried in Westminster Abbey to great public acclaim, but then suffered a meteoric decline in popularity, mainly due to the rejection of Victorian social values that followed the carnage of the First World War. The Last Days of Pompeii was the only one of his twenty-three novels to remain in constant circulation.