Books with author Bart. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton

The Last Days of PompeiiByEdward George Bulwer-LyttonThe city of Pompeii was an ancient Roman town-city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei. Pompeii, along with Herculaneum and many villas in the surrounding area, was mostly destroyed and buried under 4 to 6 m (13 to 20 ft) of ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.Researchers believe that the town was founded in the seventh or sixth century BC by the Osci or Oscans. It came under the domination of Rome in the 4th century BC, and was conquered and became a Roman colony in 80 BC after it joined an unsuccessful rebellion against the Roman Republic. By the time of its destruction, 160 years later, its population was estimated at 11,000 people, and the city had a complex water system, an amphitheatre, gymnasium, and a port.The eruption destroyed the city, killing its inhabitants and burying it under tons of ash. Evidence for the destruction originally came from a surviving letter by Pliny the Younger, who saw the eruption from a distance and described the death of his uncle Pliny the Elder, an admiral of the Roman fleet, who tried to rescue citizens. The site was lost for about 1,500 years until its initial rediscovery in 1599 and broader rediscovery almost 150 years later by Spanish engineer Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre in 1748. The objects that lay beneath the city have been preserved for centuries because of the lack of air and moisture. These artifacts provide an extraordinarily detailed insight into the life of a city during the Pax Romana. During the excavation, plaster was used to fill in the voids in the ash layers that once held human bodies. This allowed one to see the exact position the person was in when he or she died.Pompeii has been a tourist destination for over 250 years. Today it has UNESCO World Heritage Site status and is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy, with approximately 2.5 million visitors every year.

“Bulwer-Lytton was a prolific writer….His novels were very famous in his lifetime, and their range is an indication of the literary variety and changes in the Victorian period. He was a friend of the philosopher William Godwin whose influence can be traced in his early novels such as Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832). He was also influenced by the fashionable society and it is reflected in his first successful work Pelham, which has a similarity to Benjamin Disraeli’s political novels of high society….The literary output produced during the mid of his career such as The Caxtons – A Family Picture was written under the influence of the strict Victorian moral code. He showed the influence of Sir Walter Scott on the Victorian in his historical novel such as The Last Days of Pompeii, Rienzi, and The Last of the Barons while The Pilgrims of the Rhine shows the German influence.” -The Atlantic Companion to Literature in English "The first nineteenth-century novelist to project himself as an intellectual, interested in ideas, and how fiction can be their vehicle." -John Sutherland. “We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.” - Edward Bulwer-Lytton

From PELHAM to the PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE, from RIENZI to the LAST DAYS OF POMPEII, -- PAUL CLIFFORD is the only one in which a robber has been made the hero, or the peculiar phases of life which he illustrates have been brought into any prominent description. Without pausing to inquire what realm of manners or what order of crime and sorrow is open to art, and capable of administering to the proper ends of fiction, I may be permitted to observe that the present subject was selected, and the Novel written, with a twofold object: First, to draw attention to two errors in our penal institutions; namely, a vicious prison-discipline, and a sanguinary criminal code, -- the habit of corrupting the boy by the very punishment that ought to redeem him, and then hanging the man at the first occasion, as the easiest way of getting rid of our own blunders. Between the example of crime which the tyro learns from the felons in the prison-yard, and the horrible levity with which the mob gather round the drop at Newgate, there is a connection which a writer may be pardoned for quitting loftier regions of imagination to trace and to detect. So far this book is less a picture of the king's highway than the law's royal road to the gallows, -- a satire on the short cut established between the House of Correction and the Condemned Cell. A second and a lighter object in the novel of PAUL CLIFFORD (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque or travesty in the earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing essentially different between vulgar vice and fashionable vice, and that the slang of the one circle is but an easy paraphrase of the cant of the other.

Classic Victorian tale of the last days of Pompeii, doomed city that lay at the feet of Mount Vesuvius. From poets to flower-girls, gladiators to Roman tribunes, here is a plausible story of their lives, their loves, and the tragic fate that awaited them. The novel uses its characters to contrast the decadent culture of first-century Rome with both older cultures and coming trends. The protagonist, Glaucus, represents the Greeks who have been subordinated by Rome, and his nemesis Arbaces the still older culture of Egypt. Olinthus is the chief representative of the nascent Christian religion, which is presented favorably but not uncritically. The Witch of Vesuvius, though she has no supernatural powers, shows Bulwer-Lytton’s interest in the occult.'HO, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus to–night?' said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in those loose and effeminate folds which proved him to be a gentleman and a coxcomb.'Alas, no! dear Clodius; he has not invited me,' replied Diomed, a man of portly frame and of middle age. 'By Pollux, a scurvy trick! for they say his suppers are the best in Pompeii'.'Pretty well—though there is never enough of wine for me. It is not the old Greek blood that flows in his veins, for he pretends that wine makes him dull the next morning.''There may be another reason for that thrift,' said Diomed, raising his brows.