Abstract
Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was one of the most popular and successful examples of a classical historical novel for much of the nineteenth century. This research engages with the renewed scholarly interest in Bulwer’s novel, examining the impact it had, both on his readers and on the city of Pompeii itself.
Falling under the historical novel genre, Last Days follows many of the tropes popularised by Sir Walter Scott. Like Scott, Bulwer set his novel in a moment of important historical change, created a passive protagonist through whose eyes the reader views the novel, and concluded his novel with a marriage which unites and reconciles the tension of the novel. However, Bulwer found ways to differentiate his novel by making history, as well as the characters of the story, the focal point of his plot. By comparing Last Days with a previous classical historical novel, John Gibson Lockhart’s Valerius (1821), this thesis explores the changes and choices Bulwer makes to differentiate his novel from its predecessors, and consequently to ensure its enduring popularity.
The novel’s central conflict results from the religious tensions present in Bulwer’s fictional Pompeii. This thesis views Bulwer’s religious milieu in relation to the religious tensions of his own day and explores the idea that the ongoing religious struggles within the Victorian era influenced readers’ engagements with the novel throughout the century.
The thesis also examines the popularity of the character of Nydia, a blind slave girl who has literary predecessors in the works of Goethe and Scott, but ultimately stands on her own. Her characterisation as a disabled character who has links to the supernatural, and her attempts to fight against a society which attempts to delegate her to the periphery of the community, are important in understanding what made readers admire her.