Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s the classic Pompeii disaster story everybody replays when they write about Pompeii. What you get is a fantastic reconstruction of the ancient world. Christians who are going to escape, the nasty priest of Isis, the sacrifices and the gladiators. You have to understand this book was phenomenally successful in the 19th century. You can be sniffy about Harry Potter and you can be sniffy about Bulwer Lytton, but when these books touch a generation there’s a reason for it.
Your next book gets a bad press. I’m talking about The Last Days of Pompeii, with its much quoted and ridiculed opening… “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Bulwer Lytton has this terribly bad press and there is even an annual competition in his name to find the worst opening to a book!
Considering it has been so marginalized, why defend it?
Well, I’ve been drawn into this, partly because I’ve been writing about Pompeii. But also there is this incredible influence it has on anyone studying Pompeii. It’s the classic Pompeii disaster story everybody replays when they write about Pompeii. When he went to Pompeii it was a ruin. These days they’ve done a lot of work on it. What Lytton did was build it up layer by layer. And what you get is a fantastic reconstruction of the ancient world. Christians who are going to escape, the nasty priest of Isis, the sacrifices and the gladiators. The cultural backwash that came out of it was extraordinary. The characters, statues, movies.
So a bit like Harry Potter.
Yes, what you have to understand is that this book was phenomenally successful in the 19th century. You can be sniffy about Harry Potter and you can be sniffy about Bulwer Lytton, but when these books touch a generation there’s a reason for it.
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Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is the Classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement and author of the blog, A Don’s Life, which appears in The Times as a regular column. Her frequent media appearances and sometimes controversial public statements have led to her being described as “Britain’s best-known classicist”.
