Books with title Last Days of Pompeii

“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

City, which, Jmore perhaps than either the delicious breeze or the cloudless sun, the violet valleys and orange-groves of the South, attract the traveller to Naples; on viewing, still fresh and vivid, the houses, the streets, the temples, the theatres of a place existing in the haughtiest age of the Roman empire it was not unnatural, perhaps, that a writer who had before laboured, however unworthily, in the art to revive and create, should feel a keen desire to people once more those deserted streets, to repair those graceful ruins, to reanimate the bones which were yet spared to his survey; to traverse the gulf of eighteen centuries, and to wake to a second existence the City of the Dead! Pompeii !A nd the reader will easily imagine how sensibly this desire grew upon one who felt he could perform his undertaking, with Pompeii itself at the distance of a few miles the sea that once bore her commerce, and received her fugitives, at his feet and the fatal mountain of Vesuvius, still breathing forth smoke and fire, constantly before his eyes !I was aware, however, from the first of the great difficulties with which I had to contend. To paint the manners and exhibit the life of the middle ages, required the hand of a master genius; yet, perhaps, the task is slight and easy in comparison with that which aspires to portray a far earlier and more unfamiliar period. With the men and customs of the feudal time we have a natural sympathy and bond of alliance ;those men were our own ancestors from those customs we received our own the creed of our chivalric fathers is still ours their tombs yet consecrate our churches the ruins of their castles yet frown over our valleys. We trace in their struggles for liberty and for justice our present institutions ;and in the elements of their social state we behold the origin of our own. Yet the task, though arduous, seemed to me (Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.

The Last Days of Pompeii is a novel written by the baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1834. The novel was inspired by the painting The Last Day of Pompeii by the Russian painter Karl Briullov, which Bulwer-Lytton had seen in Milan. Once a very widely read book and now relatively neglected, it culminates in the cataclysmic destruction of the city of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC (25 May 1803 – 18 January 1873), was an English politician, poet, playwright, and novelist. He was immensely popular with the reading public and wrote a stream of bestselling novels which earned him a considerable fortune. He coined several phrases that would become clichés, especially "the great unwashed","the pen is mightier than the sword", as well as the famous opening line "It was a dark and stormy night".