Edward Bulwer-Lytton' The Last Days of Pompeii (1834, LDP) was one of the most popular English historical novels of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of the virtuous Greeks Glaucus and Ione, their escape from Pompeii amid the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, and their eventual conversion to Christianity, against a background of Roman decadence and corrupt Eastern religion. This chapter seeks to relate LDP's emphasis on the exposition and reconstruction of ancient city life in Pompeii to its author's interaction with the excavations and with their publication in the work of Sir William Gell and to the contemporary literary genre of novelized handbooks on Greek and Roman private life. It suggests that the extant Latin novels of Petronius and Apuleius are implicitly claimed by Bulwer-Lytton as prestigious literary ancestors of LDP's own form.
