Victorianstudies 53 2 255

The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage
Author(s): Nicholas Daly

Source: Victorian Studies , Vol. 53, No. 2 (Winter 2011), pp. 255-285
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.53.2.255
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The Volcanic Disaster Narrative:
From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage
Nicholas Daly
D
isaster narratives recur in the high and popular culture of the
nineteenth century, appearing in narrative fiction, poetry,
drama, opera, fine-art history, and landscape painting, as well
as in more spectacular popular forms. The events of such narratives
turn on the annihilation of people and property; their structures are
characterized by the interruption of narrative continuity; and their
philosophy generally suggests the limitations of human powers and
the inevitable frustration of schemes and hopes. We are familiar with
disaster narratives as a component of our own international popular
culture, with the disaster film a particularly recognizable genre that
has shed its B-movie connotations to become a major strain of the big-
budget Hollywood blockbuster (a term with its own echoes of whole-
sale destruction). All such narratives share a relatively under-theorized
aesthetic element: the pleasure of the reader or viewer in destruc-
tion—of people, of property, of hopes. While this pleasure may have
something in common with the pity and terror evoked by Aristotelian
tragedy, we might also speculate that enjoyment of such scenes is
rooted in the subject’s aggressive drives, whether or not one sees that
aggression as the outward projection of an innate Freudian death-
drive. Yet while there are evident continuities, our familiarity with
contemporary disaster narratives may mislead. In twentieth- and twenty-
first-century disaster texts the interest often resides in the post-disaster
Abstract: This essay surveys the volcano spectacles, paintings, plays, and narratives
that appear at the end of the eighteenth century, thrive in the nineteenth, and live on
well into the twentieth. Moving amphibiously between popular and high culture, this
polymodal “commodity experience” imagines historical change as catastrophe, and
projects the modern into the past and the forces of modernity onto the natural world.
Its ability to absorb political content in part underwrites the success of the volcano
story, and in such nineteenth-century versions as Edward Lytton Bulwer’s The Last Days
of Pompeii (1834), the volcano is identified with the crowd and with revolution. But
alongside the political allegory, a more basic audience delight in destruction itself
seems part of the lingering power of the volcano.
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256 Nicholas Daly
society, or the family unit that survives, say, malevolent weather, town-
swallowing geological events, or nuclear armageddon.1 In the nine-
teenth-century scenarios individuals or groups sometimes escape
disaster to form the nucleus of a new society, but sometimes they do
not. The emphasis can be on annihilation as much as regeneration.
Here I want to look at a particular subset of the earlier imaginary of
disaster, the volcano entertainments—spectacles, plays, operas, novels,
paintings—that appear at the end of the eighteenth century, and that
linger in European and American culture in a variety of cultural forms
well into the twentieth century. In these entertainments, all that is
solid does not so much melt into air as disappear beneath fiery lava
and pyroclastic ash; the world is not drowned as in the Biblical deluge,
but incinerated. The best-known of these is probably Edward Lytton
Bulwer’s (he did not change his name to Bulwer Lytton until 1843) The
Last Days of Pompeii (1834), but as we shall see that novel drew exten-
sively on what was already a clearly defined convention.
My interest in the volcano narrative as a subset of disaster is
twofold. In the first place, it enjoys a teasingly allusive relation to the polit-
ical. In the early-modern period the natural power of the volcano
mimicked the divinely-ordained might of the prince. In the years that I
am considering here, however, it is the fires of revolution that seem to
burn most brightly in the heart of the volcano, even as the precise nature
of these revolutionary forces seems to shift. Indeed, volcanic entertain-
ments owe at least some of their success to their very capacity to absorb
such changing political content. The volcano entertainment also attracts,
though, because of its polymodal aspect. As a narrative device, theatrical
special effect, and sublime fine-art spectacle, inter alia, it crosses not just
genres and modes, but media, and one of the things I want to focus on
here is its viral spread across such boundaries, and its mutations as it does
so. This mobility brings with it certain theoretical difficulties, as well as
issues of vocabulary, some of which will already be evident. For example,
fine-art paintings of volcanoes are not, of course, disaster “narratives” in
any real sense, but rather what we might term “narrative images”; fire-
work displays, even those with a narrative component, are a different
kind of entity again. From the various perspectives of traditional literary
analysis, popular cultural studies, and structuralism, we could view the
volcano itself as a highly mobile topos; an unusual variety of popular hero
familiar to a wide audience without there being any single foundational
text; or as a narrative actant or Barthesian seme.2 At different moments
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The Volcanic Disaster Narrative 257
the volcano’s representational adventures recall the “remediation”

described by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their account of the
way rival media remodel each other’s content (65–86); and they recall as
well the opposition of “illustration” and “realization” described by Martin
Meisel in his monumental survey of the cross-play among visual, narra-
tive, and dramatic modes in the nineteenth century (29–37). Indeed, the
pictorialism and orientation toward effects that Meisel identifies in nine-
teenth-century drama, fiction, and narrative poetry are distinct features
of the texts I survey here. However, while I want to keep some of these
possibilities in sight, I will suggest a different approach: following Anne
Friedberg’s work on early cinema I will treat the volcano narrative as a
polymodal “commodity-experience,” a form of goods aimed at the imagi-
nation through the senses, from three-dimensional models to three-
decker novels.3 In the late eighteenth century the volcano was a form of
spectacular box-office property that was exploited in various ways, and
the volcano narrative’s more high-literary and artistic appearances in the
nineteenth century continued to be paralleled by its perennial success as
popular spectacle. Rather than thinking of these modalities of the
volcano narrative as radically different, I want to suggest that for heuristic
purposes we view its popular and high-cultural allotropes together, while
keeping in mind their formal differences. In this light we might consider
the volcano as a particularly successful commodity-experience that in its
different aspects captured disparate but sometimes overlapping audi-
ences, rather as Pirates of the Caribbean, say, existed first as a Disneyland
ride, and then as a series of films, while also being simultaneously novel-
ized and turned into toys and video games.4 That some of its allotropes
are more complex than others and have different formal features does
not mean that they are incommensurable. We will encounter examples in
which the erupting volcano is a subordinated part of a more complex
narrative or dramatic experience, but in all of them the volcano is there
as a smoldering presence from the start, and our pleasure in other
elements of our experience is both shadowed and enhanced by our
knowledge that in the end it will explode.
The Early Years: Volcano Shows
The volcano as entertainment erupts first not onto the page or

stage but within the specialized entertainment world of pyrotechnics.
The use of fireworks to mimic volcanoes begins at least as early as the
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258 Nicholas Daly
Renaissance, when, as Kevin Salatino notes, monarchs and other

powerful figures mounted firework spectaculars as emblems of their
own might (54–56). In written accounts of such spectacles, the ruler is
identified not just with the volcano’s power, but with the Pythagorean
flux of the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—and the renewal of
the world, or with the subduing of nature itself. Fireworks, volcanic or
not, continued to be used to mark royal or state events into the modern
period: births, birthdays, and marriages; military victories; peace agree-
ments, such as that at Aix-La-Chapelle in 1749, which ended the War of
the Austrian Succession and was marked by firework displays all over
Europe, and so on (Brock passim). In this form fireworks were often
under the purview of military ordnance and served as a literal reminder
to the populace of the state’s firepower; perhaps because they also
suggested real explosives, such entertainments tended to be cancelled
when revolution was in the air.5 Pyrotechnics were also associated with
various festivals, from saints’ days in Italy and the annual pyrotechnic
Girandola at the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, part of the Carnevale, to
Guy Fawkes’s Night in Britain, with its lively commemoration of popish
plots foiled. Where such events involve the burning of effigies, as at Guy
Fawkes’s Night, they suggest some continuity with older, pagan harvest
festivals and rituals, and perhaps even with real or symbolic sacrifice to
the gods (Brock 126).6 Thus when secular, commercial firework volcano
shows developed first in Britain in the various pleasure gardens of the
eighteenth century, such as Marylebone in London, they came trailing
earlier associations with military firepower on the one hand, and with
chthonic forces and ritual burning on the other.
When the secular volcano shows appear, it is against the back-
drop of a new interest in volcanoes shaped by the discovery of Pompeii, a
series of actual eruptions in various parts of the world, and the rise of
modern vulcanology. The impact of the excavation of the ruins of
Pompeii from the 1740s on was especially consequential. (Pompeii had
indeed been “discovered” before, but major excavation began only in
1748.) In 79 CE, Vesuvius rained down tephra, ash, and other pyroclastic
particles on the unfortunate town of Pompeii—which was probably still
recovering from the earthquake of 62 CE—as well as Herculaneum and
Stabiae. The towns were both destroyed and preserved by the volcano,
and in the eighteenth century scholars, including Johann-Joachim
Winckelmann, began to realize what an extraordinary window onto the
past they offered. Their material culture was disseminated by such

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figures as William Hamilton, British ambassador to the court of Naples

from 1764 to 1800, and sponsor of the influential hand-colored illus-
trated book, Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines, edited by Pierre-
François Hugues (1767–76). Hamilton further stimulated the British
(and indirectly American) appetite for the lost city by shipping quanti-
ties of antique artifacts, including some from Pompeii, to London, where
they were sold to collectors (Coates and Sedyll 4). Fed into an already
powerful stream of neoclassicism, the colorful remnants of the material
world of Pompeii shaped everything from the architecture of Robert and
James Adam to the “Etruscan” pottery of Josiah Wedgewood, who even
christened his pottery “Etruria” (Amery and Curran 168–83). Thus, out
of the ashes of Vesuvius emerged a “Pompeian style,” which became
freshly calcified in such handbooks as John Goldicutt’s Specimens of
Ancient Decoration from Pompeii (1825) and Owen Jones’s Grammar of Orna-
ment (1856).
The volcanic power that had destroyed and preserved Pompeii
became a focus of study in its own right in this period. While Vesuvius
and Etna had reawakened in the seventeenth century (Vesuvius in 1631
and 1694, Etna in 1669), modern vulcanology did not really appear until
the eighteenth century, stimulated by such major eruptions as Santorini
(1707), and Vesuvius itself (1737 and 1767). The latter eruption was
particularly important for volcano lore in Britain, as William Hamilton
(again) had witnessed it, and described it both in a letter to the Royal
Society in 1768 and in his later Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount
Etna, and other Volcanos (1772) and Campi Phlegraei (1776), which featured
dramatic illustrations of the “fields of fire” by the Italian artist Pietro
Fabris. Vesuvius continued to be active in the late eighteenth century
and early nineteenth, drawing scientific visitors, among others. In the
complex late-Enlightenment debates about the nature and age of the
earth, volcanoes—like earthquakes—were of interest to advocates of
Vulcanism or Plutonism (championed by James Hutton in Edinburgh),
who saw subterranean heat as the source of geological change, in
contrast to the Neptunists (championed by Abraham Gottlob Werner at
Freiburg), who favored the role of the oceans. Such debates took on
national contours: in Britain volcanoes came to be associated through
Hutton’s work with theories of gradual, natural change, as opposed to
diluvian theories of sudden catastrophe (Withers 125–29). Insofar as
they came to betoken materialist rather than divine cosmologies,
however, such gradualist theories had radical overtones: this aspect of
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260 Nicholas Daly
volcanic symbolism circulated more widely in the 1830s and 1840s, when
Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), Elements of Geology (1838),
and Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) all gave the volcano
renewed prominence in popular science (Stein 97–99).
It is against this variegated backdrop, then, that the staging of
volcanic eruptions became a significant component of eighteenth-
century popular culture and developed into a commodity-experience
in the nineteenth century. As Richard Altick notes in his monumental
Shows of London, commercial volcanic spectacles appear first in the
1770s at the Georgian pleasure gardens, where Mount Etna enjoyed
particular popularity (96).7 In 1772, for the King’s Birthday, Maryle-
bone Gardens offered “The Forge of Vulcan” on the side of Mount
Etna, in which a “mountain . . . appeared in eruption, with lava rushing
down the precipices,” the work of an Italian pyrotechnician, Giovanni
Batista Torre (Sands 93–94). Rockets fitted to ropes probably produced
the main fire-effects; underlit and transparent troughs of water created
the appearance of lava. There was a revival of pyrotechnic volcanic
entertainment at Ranelagh in May of 1792: again audiences saw the
forge of Vulcan on the side of Mount Etna, with the Cyclops forging
the armor of Mars to the music of Christoph Gluck, Franz Joseph
Haydn, Felice Giardini, and George Frideric Handel. According to a
contemporary account, “the smoke thickens, the crater on top of Etna
vomits forth flames, and the lava rolls dreadful (sic) along the side of
the mountain. This continues with increasing violence till there is a
prodigious explosion” (Wroth and Wroth 215–16). This show continued
to draw the crowds at Ranelagh for a number of years. We might specu-
late that the appeal of such commercial pyrotechnics was underwritten
by new, non-volcanic forces: by 1792 the volcano could register in a
contained and ordered form both the fires of the French Revolution
and the seismic changes wrought by industrialization. Nature here is
the guise in which social and political change appears. The mytholog-
ical materials used to structure the explosive son et lumière suggest that
the volcano show was never simply a firework display, but was built into
narratives (and accompanied by music) that appealed to an educated
audience; muted allegories of war and revolution (Mars) or of indus-
trial forces (the forge) might add a certain frisson, but they were safely
contained within a classical frame.
Indoors too the volcano was good box-office from the second
half of the eighteenth century, when it appeared at that uncertain

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boundary between the educational and the entertaining. William

Hamilton had pioneered the indoor volcano show after a fashion, with a
transparency of Vesuvius in eruption painted by Pietro Fabris that he
sent to the Royal Society in 1767 (Salatino 96–98). Following his example,
but for more commercial than scientific purposes, Hugh Dean put on a
volcano spectacle that used transparencies and sound effects in Great
Hart Street, Covent Garden, in 1780. Torre, the pyrotechnicist we
encountered earlier, had arrived in England with the artist Philippe
Jacques de Loutherbourg, who made use of the Bay of Naples as spec-
tacle in 1781 as part of his Eidophusikon (in effect a more sophisticated
version of Dean’s show) using transparent dioramic paintings and
changing lighting and sound effects (Altick 96, 117–27). Transparencies
were not the only way of staging disaster: elsewhere, cork models provided
volcanic entertainment with an educational gloss. In 1785 one such show,
Richard Dubourg’s display of classical cork models, was destroyed by an
out-of-control miniature Vesuvius, but this did not discourage other
showmen, and at a variety of locations in the early 1800s Londoners
could see Vesuvian eruptions as an adjunct to scale-model displays of
Roman buildings. (Curiously, these appear to have been staged by
another gentleman using the name Dubourg.) At one such show, not
only could the public see the flaming lava sweep toward the coastal town
of Portici, but they could smell “burning sulphur, and such other effluvia
as volcanoes usually emit” (Altick 96). Indeed, this show might be thought
of as an early version of the Sensorama, or of Smell-O-Vision, or other
synaesthetic experiments of the latter half of the twentieth century:
while reduced in scale, this variety of the volcano show aimed at total
viewer immersion.
Mixed Media
Volcanoes did not roar in popular spectacle alone. While they

appear but rarely in seventeenth-century painting, volcanoes feature
frequently in fine art from roughly the same period as the volcano shows,
when they come to provide a rich source of aesthetic thrills for viewers
schooled in the Burkean sublime (Murphy passim). (We should not
discount, of course, the extent to which knowledge of Edmund Burke
may also have underwritten the popularity of firework shows and indoor
volcano spectacles.) We see this aesthetic at work in such paintings as
Joseph Wright of Derby’s Vesuvius from Portici (c. 1774–76) and Vesuvius in
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262 Nicholas Daly
Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples (c. 1776–80), two of
the thirty or so views of Vesuvius he was to paint over the course of his
career, though he missed an actual eruption on his only visit to Naples.8
Wright was not entirely a pioneer in his Vesuvian studies: beginning with
Claude Joseph Vernet, French artists had begun to capture and interpret
the volcano on canvas, though in Vernet’s Vue de Naples avec le Vésuve
(c. 1748) Vesuvius is a relatively minor feature. Charles-Francois Grenier
de Lacroix (known as Lacroix de Marseilles) and Vernet’s pupil Pierre-
Jacques Volaire, working in Naples from the 1760s, really created the
vogue for more dramatic Vesuvian art that harnessed fear in the service
of pleasure. Volaire’s large canvases (46 x 95 5/8 inches), The Eruption of
Vesuvius (1771), now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Eruption
of Mount Vesuvius (1777) are good examples of his approach, imposing
panoramic works that show the fiery mountain towering in the back-
ground, more steeply than it actually appears, while human figures are
dwarfed in the foreground, bathed in an eerie glow. Lacroix de
Marseilles’s A Moonlit Landscape with Figures on a Quay by a Lighthouse,
Mount Vesuvius Erupting Beyond (1756), follows a similar approach, quite
different to that of Wright’s in which the human is a much more subdued
presence. Joseph Mallord William Turner’s Vesuvius in Eruption (1817) is
very much in the Volaire tradition, though remarkably he compresses
the energy of the volcano into a small watercolor, measuring just 11 1/4
inches by 15 5/8 (Murphy 17). Gallery collections and auction records
suggest that such erupting volcanoes remained a popular subject for
artists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, presum-
ably in part because even after the vogue of the sublime had yielded to
the more restrained pleasures of the picturesque such paintings could
be readily sold to the tourists, grand and otherwise, who came to admire
the Bay of Naples.9
In this period we see the increasing dominance of Pompeii in
the volcano narrative tradition as the more antiquarian interest in its
ruins shaded into a Romantic fascination with the City of the Dead, a
whole antique world preserved by volcanic catastrophe like a fly in amber,
or like the court of Sleeping Beauty as novelist Thomas Gray suggested in
1820 (Gray v). Not the least attraction of Pompeii, of course, was that its
historical otherness did not prevent it from being a mirror in which the
nineteenth century sometimes liked to recognize itself—a complex and
pleasure-loving urban society poised on the edge of cataclysmic change.
Vesuvian narratives, that is, overlap with that category of nineteenth-

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century cultural artifacts that dress modernity in classical garb, from the
imperial sublime of Turner’s Dido Building Carthage (1815) to the decid-
edly bourgeois Rome of Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s An Earthly Paradise
(1891).10 And it is at this point in its career that the volcano begins to take
on a more complex and non-mythological narrative aspect. Pompeii’s
end had inspired a number of treatments in the previous century, such
as Jacob More’s Mount Vesuvius in Eruption: The Last Days of Pompeii (1780;
see Landow, Images 9), but the early nineteenth century brought a signifi-
cantly greater interest in the historical disaster of 79 CE: many represen-
tations henceforth focus less on the spectacle of the volcano per se, and
more on the collision of the volcano with humanity, the moment of
destruction and preservation. Treatments of this type include John
Martin’s high-Romantic painting, The Destruction of Pompeii and Hercula-
neum (1821), an extraordinary vision that makes their end look like the
end of the world itself. As with the concurrent wave of Egyptomania, fed
by Giovanni Battista Belzoni’s excavations and writings, the interest in
Pompeii glided amphibiously among the relatively exclusive worlds of
salon and gallery and the more inclusive commercial culture upon which
we have already touched: Martin’s painting was turned into a diorama at
the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1822 (the same year as another major
eruption of Vesuvius) and two years later visitors to Burford’s Panorama
in Leicester Square could see a View of the Ruins of the City of Pompeii and
the Surrounding Country. Like Egypt, the volcano story could be reworked
into a variety of commodity-experiences for disparate audiences.
The immediate source for Martin’s apocalyptic canvas was in
fact from yet another medium, Edwin Atherstone’s The Last Days of
Herculaneum (1821), a narrative poem. In Atherstone’s grim 88–page
epic we see for the first time a detailed verbal description of “the last
days” of the city in 79 CE that combines a narrative of the destructive
force of Vesuvius with a series of vignettes of individuals caught up in
the holocaust. Here, in other words, the commodity-experience of the
volcano takes on a new aspect; the “special effect” begins to generate
new kinds of narrative around itself. While owing something to the
“Graveyard” poets of the previous century, The Last Days can be
enrolled in that “School of Catastrophe” that Curtis Dahl identifies as
an influential part of the literary and artistic culture of Britain and
America in these years, and which seemed to rejoice in the destruction
of property and human life (Dahl, “American School” 380–81). Thus,
unlike most subsequent narrative treatments, Atherstone starts with
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264 Nicholas Daly
the disaster, and only in occasional paralepses do we get a glimpse of

the previous life of the city. The poem’s real raison d’etre seems to be
its elaborate descriptions of unpleasant deaths, and of people escaping
one horror only to meet with another, rather as in Charles Maturin’s
gothic novel of the previous year, Melmoth the Wanderer. Here is an
example of Atherstone’s grand-guignol technique:
Where are now the hapless crowds

That lately fill’d the streets?‡‡‡Look on the earth;—
There blacken’d corses lie by lightning singed:‡‡‡
There, tumbling down the stream, a hideous head
Nods in its course:‡‡‡‡‡there, underneath yon pile
Of levell’d walls, some mangled limb alone
Looks out in gore bedrench’d from the crush’d trunk
Hot welling:‡‡‡and see there a head forth peeps:‡‡‡
Thoughtful and calm it seems, though somewhat pale,
And lightly dash’d with blood:‡‡‡you’d say it lived,
And matters deep was pondering . . .
. . . but that, flat press’d
Beneath yon mountain load,‡‡‡what once was limbs,‡‡‡
Heart‡‡‡lungs‡‡‡flesh‡‡‡nerves and bone‡‡‡to form a man,
Now lies a crimson jelly‡‡‡oozing slow,
And bubbling from beneath.—
The cameos of individuals—the Roman soldier who is briefly reunited

by the earthquake with his dead son, the paterfamilias who kills first
his family and then himself to save them from more excruciating
deaths, the “youthful female, of a form / Perfect as beauty’s goddess,”
singing lullabies to the headless infant in her arms—seem to exist only
to make the general horror more specific and effective. Ultimately, in
its relentless chronicle of death and destruction, Atherstone’s poem is
more wearying than horrifying, and indeed rather runs out of steam
early on: by the time “the all-destroying lava” comes on page 83,
everyone is already dead, except, that is, the one man who escapes to
tell the tale “and die / A maniac.”
The Pompeiian volcano soon migrated to yet another medium:
the opera. On November 19, 1825, audiences at the Teatro San Carlo in
Naples enjoyed a musical disaster narrative, L’Ultimo giorno di Pompei by
Giovanni Pacini, an event-filled two-act opera that made use of recent
excavations for its details. Two years later La Scala staged a spectacular
production of the same piece, and in 1831 it reached London. L’Ultimo
giorno centers on the machinations of the tribune, Appio Diomede,

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whose advances are spurned by the virtuous wife of the magistrate,

Sallustio. Falsely accused of adultery, she is sentenced to death by live
burial, but the volcano erupts at the crucial moment as an act of divine
intervention. Created by architect Antonio Niccolini, and later enhanced
at La Scala by the elaborate scenic paintings of Alessandro Sanquirico,
the eruption made for a suitably operatic conclusion. According to a
contemporary Neapolitan review: “l’ultima scena presentante un quadro
grandioso e desolante della citta sotto la pioggia di lapilli in mezzo all’inondamento
delle fiamme di fuoco che trabboccavano dal Vesuvio” [“the final scene presents
a magnificent and distressing picture of the town under a shower of
volcanic stones, in the midst of the fiery flames that overflow Vesuvius”]
(Melfi 162, my translation). The shower of volcanic stones was probably
created by using painted sponges, as we learn from later descriptions of
volcanic special effects (“Man-Made” 241), but it evidently created a spell-
binding illusion. In London, the Examiner, which also admired the accu-
racy in the reproduction of the streets of Pompeii at the King’s Theatre
in the Haymarket, proclaimed that “the eruption, with the falling
temples, and showers of ashes and fire, is the finest scene of the kind we
ever witnessed” (“Theatrical Examiner”).
Pacini’s opera is probably the first cultural artifact in which
the eruption of a volcano appears as a fully plot-subordinated “special
effect,” rather than as the sole attraction of the representation, as it
had been in the fireworks, the transparencies, the paintings, or even
Atherstone’s poem. In this it inspired many successors. These included
a liberally adapted version of December 8, 1828, The Earthquake; or The
Spectre of the Nile (Adelphi), a “Burletta Operatic Spectacle” that brought
the conventions of melodrama to plot elements derived from Thomas
Moore’s The Epicurean (1827) and special effects from Pacini. (In
Moore’s novel the Epicurean protagonist, Alciphron, falls in love with
a priestess of Isis, Alethe, who is secretly a Christian; they flee Memphis,
and the snares of the Egyptian priesthood, but ultimately they cannot
escape persecution.) Calculated to capitalize on the vogue of all things
Egyptian, additional spectacle was provided by a moving panorama of
the Nile. In the end the vengeful Egyptian sorcerer, Orchus, a priest of
Osiris, is denied his prey, a Christian maiden, by an earthquake and
inferno, and the lovers escape—a much more cheerful ending than
that of Moore’s novel.11 But, indicating the portability of the volcano as
an effect, the first play on the London stage inspired by Pacini’s ending
was one that eschewed the classical past for modern gothic. This was a
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266 Nicholas Daly
Fig. 1. Alessandro Sanquirico. Set design for La Scala production of Pacini’s L’ultimo
giorno di Pompei. From Sceniche decorazioni inventate, e dipinte pel dramma serio L’ultimo
giorno di Pompei (Milan, 1827-32). Image © Christie’s Images Limited 2004.
liberal adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Henry M.

Milner’s Frankenstein; Or, The Man and the Monster (Royal Cobourg: July
3, 1826), partly based on a French play, Le Magicien et le Monstre. The
final scene at Mount Etna shows “the Summit only of that Volcano as
seen on the Spot, with all the terrific appearances that attend its awful
Eruption, the first attempt ever made to display this tremendous Spec-
tacle on the Stage” (3). The monster is shown at bay, surrounded by
soldiers and armed peasants, and pursued by his own maker. Finally,
like the Empedocles of legend, “he immediately leaps into the crater,
now vomiting burning lava” (25).12
In a more direct line of descent, Pacini’s opera was a primary
source for what is probably the first novel to exploit the possibilities of
the volcano and of Pompeii as a narrative setting rich in dramatic
irony, Thomas Gray’s The Vestal, or A Tale of Pompeii (1830), which, like
the opera, features a villain who schemes to have the object of his lust
buried alive when she refuses him, and a Vesuvian eruption as the
long-expected climax of the action. Gray, probably also borrowing
from Moore’s The Epicurean, introduces a significant innovation to the
volcano narrative by incorporating nascent Christianity: to do so, he

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transfers the 79 CE eruption to the second persecution of Christians

under the reign of Domitian in 95 CE. In Pompeii, “we are transported
at once from modern times to the days of our Savior and of his apos-
tles. The curtain that separated the past from the present is taken away
and we breathe and move among realized dreams and fables” (Gray
vi). The novel takes the form of a first-person account by a modern-day
visitor to Italy who is given a worm-eaten manuscript, a tale of Pompeii,
by a Catholic priest (again, there are echoes of Moore’s novel here, as
well as of the gothic). Written mostly in the first person, the manu-
script tells the story of Lucius and his conversion to Christianity when
he meets Lucilla, a Vestal Virgin who secretly practices the new faith.
Through the machinations of Matho, her frustrated seducer, Lucilla is
buried alive, having been falsely accused of betraying her office by
letting the Vestal flame go out. Lucius rescues her from the tomb, and
they flee to safety, but when her mother, Favella, is taken to be punished
in her stead, Lucilla feels she must return to Pompeii, and Lucius
follows. Lucilla is imprisoned and faces death, but as Favella and the
venerable Christian Vitullius await their fate in the amphitheater,
Vesuvius intervenes:
The terrible mountain had suddenly opened its abysses—it seemed to cleave and
be rent in various directions, and from every cleft burst torrents of flame, roaring
and curling high in the air. From the centre of the crater, a solid column of fire
was seen shooting up into the very heavens, and falling at last in showers of lava,
melted stones, solid rock, ashes, cinders, boiling water, and every variety of
volcanic matter. Huge masses of stone, larger than the temple of Isis, were hurled
flying into the air as lightly as the pebble from the shepherd’s sling. Rivers of
liquid fire were seen pouring down its sides in every direction. (176)
The volcano, with its biblical echoes (“pebble from the shepherd’s
sling” is a reference to David’s slaying of Goliath) is not so much a
geological event here as a pointed act of God. Yet there is no conven-
tionally happy ending. The divinely ordained eruption saves Lucilla
and Lucius from being devoured by the wild beasts of the amphithe-
ater, but while Vitullius succumbs to the downpour of ash, they die
because they refuse to leave behind the elderly Favella. “The thick
falling ashes closed over them, as the waves of the sea close over their
victims; and the unfortunate Lucius and Lucilla lay side by side beneath
that deadly and burning mass, their arms twined around each other’s
neck, united at last only in death” (182). There is no providential
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268 Nicholas Daly
escape for the virtuous. The volcano takes the lives of the good and
wicked alike; the good will be rewarded only in the next life.
It was not long before the volcano narrative returned to
poetry: elements of Pacini, Moore, and Gray are recombined in
Sumner Lincoln Fairfield’s long narrative poem of 1832, The Last Night
of Pompeii, which again enfolds the commodity-experience of the
volcano in a Christian moral schema. At the climax of the action a
noble Pompeian virgin is about to be raped by a debauched priest of
Isis when a timely earthquake delivers her from his clutches; she flees
the priest’s subterranean lair only to find herself in the temple of
Venus, where she saves the Hebrew princess-turned-Christian convert,
Miriamne, who has fallen into the power of the lascivious praetor
Diomede. Meanwhile, Pansa, Miriamne’s beloved, about to be devoured
by a lion in the amphitheater, commands the beast to kneel—and at
that moment the eruption causes it to do just that:
A roar, as if a myriad thunders burst,

Now hurtled o’er the heavens, and the deep earth
Shuddered, and a thick storm of lava hail
Rushed into air to fall upon the world.
And low the lion cowered, with fearful moans. (162)
The crowd finally realizes the danger they are in, and suddenly all is
chaos:
One thought, one action swayed the tossing crowd.

All through the vomitories madly sprung,
And mass on mass of trembling beings pressed,
Gasping and goading, with the savageness
That is the child of danger, like the waves
Charybdis from his jagged rocks throws down. (166)
Pompeii is destroyed but the Christians escape to freedom, brands

plucked from the burning, and they go on to found a Christian commu-
nity in a new land. In Fairfield’s hands, the destruction of Pompeii,
Herculaneum, and the nearby towns becomes a parable and the volcanic
eruption simply God’s judgment on their wickedness: the manners of
the Pompeians were such as can leave us with “little regret and less aston-
ishment at the terrible overthrow of cities as excessive and not so venial
in their crimes as Gomorrah” (Fairfield 43).13

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The Fires of Revolution
By the 1830s, then, the volcano narrative was available to the

novelist and the poet as well as to the dramatist and composer, while
continuing to circulate as a form of popular pyrotechnic spectacle. For
all their differences, these forms built a world in order to destroy it. In
its more expansive forms the volcano narrative increasingly drew upon
philosophical and religious contexts: the eruption could function
either as a providential holocaust that devoured the wicked and spared
the Christian and proto-Christian, or as a fiery cataclysm that tragi-
cally overtook all—though presumably the converts would at least be
spared the flames of eternal damnation for which the volcano acted as
worldly stand-in. But in this period the politics of the volcano also
began to mutate into something more radical, and again opera led the
way, this time Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber’s enormously successful La
Muette di Portici. In 1828 Paris descended on the Opera to see La Muette,
also known as Masaniello, which is set in seventeenth-century Naples
and in which the 1647 political revolt led by the fisherman Masaniello
against Spanish rule is conflated with the 1631 eruption of Vesuvius.
The story of Masaniello was well-known, even proverbial; this was the
fourth opera based on it. In the spectacular closing scene after Masan-
iello’s death and the failure of the revolt, the heroine leaps to her death
into a stream of lava; the crowd runs across the stage as the ground
quakes; and “on fait tomber du cintre, depuis le Vésuve jusqu’au marches, des
pierres de toute grosseur qui sont censées sortir du cratère” [“rocks of all sizes,
which are supposed to come out of the crater, are made to fall from the
flies, from Vesuvius to the steps (of the palace)”] (Fulcher 41–42; my
translation). One of the early “grand operas,” in its spectacular effects
and in its mute female lead (Fenella, the sister of Masaniello), it
adapted the popular and melodramatic fare of the boulevard theaters
(Smith 8–9). Jane Fulcher has argued that in these years the Opera,
closely aligned with the court of Charles X, strived to stage work that
chimed with popular feeling while toning down any revolutionary
content (Fulcher 11–46). Fulcher argues that their optimism was
misplaced: the reaction of the audience to La Muette de Portici, in part
mediated by an increasingly restless press, was to identify with the revo-
lutionary crowd on stage rather than to enjoy cathartic pleasure in the
tragic demise of Masaniello. In this context, it is clear that the volcano
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270 Nicholas Daly
is the objective correlative for the energies of revolution and of the

crowd itself: the Opera’s attempt to manage public feeling had only
served to fan the flames of popular unrest.
First performed at Drury Lane on May 4, 1829, descriptions of
the London version of La Muette indicate that it broadly followed the
continental staging: it ends with Masaniello’s death in battle, leading
his troops against the Spanish at which point “an eruption of Mount
Vesuvius conveniently occurs, and the piece concludes, leaving the
combatants enveloped in fiery mist” (“Drury Lane”). Before the opera
reached London, audiences had already seen a number of adaptations,
including a ballet, André Jean-Jacques Deshayes’s Masaniello, ou le Pêcheur
de Portici (1829). Other Masaniellos that year included stage versions at
the Coburg Theatre, Masaniello, or the Dumb Girl of Portici, and an eques-
trian version at Astley’s Amphitheater in Lambeth, Masaniello, or the
Revolt of Naples (Davies 39 n.64).
While its lively French reception may have been known to some,
others must have mused about volcanic energies closer to home—the
contemporary Tithe Wars and the campaign for Catholic Emancipation
in Ireland, and the campaigns for reform in England itself. The associa-
tion of volcanoes with popular revolt was already part of the vernacular
culture around “Captain Rock,” the name used in their written warnings
by those engaged in rural terrorism during the Irish Tithe Wars. Fuelled
by anger in the face of poor harvests, unfair tithes, and Protestant evan-
gelicalism, the Rockite movement also drew on the millenarian feeling
created by the circulation in popular form of the eighteenth-century
prophecies of “Pastorini” (Bishop Charles Walmesley). Local and world-
historical blend in its incendiary rhetoric. According to one Rockite
notice, signed “The Fireman, General John Rock,” “If this caution is not
immediately complied with, Vesuvius or Etna never sent forth such
crackling flames as some parts of Donoughmore will shortly emit, so that
to a distant spectator the parish will seem a solid mass of fire” (qtd. in
Donnelly 94).
Were British audiences as stirred as those of Paris by the Masani-
ello story of Vesuvian revolt? There are a few references in the reviews
that suggest they were, including an account of spontaneous applause by
audiences at the popular resistance on stage to the tax collectors. As Jane
Moody recounts, earlier versions of the Masaniello story were censored,
and a royal command performance of James Kenney’s Masaniello was
cancelled because of fears of protest (114–15). By then Auber’s opera had

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reputedly ignited the Belgian Revolution against William I, King of the

Netherlands (“The Fashionable World”). As the Examiner reported of
Brussels, “a revolutionary movement” had taken place on August 25 of
that year. “An immense crowd filled the theatre and its neighborhood,
anxious to witness the performance of the Muette de Portici (Masaniello).
During the play, symptoms of sedition appeared, and after it was over
numerous groups paraded the streets” (“Netherlands”). The people, it
appeared, had already been agitated by events in France, where in July
the Bourbon king, Charles X, had fallen, to be replaced by the constitu-
tional monarch, Louis-Philippe.14 If in the early modern period the
volcano was a convenient symbol of the power of the monarch, by the
1830s it was very clearly aligned with the people.
The Last Days
By 1835, as suggested by the advertising posters in John Parry’s

extraordinary painting of that year, A London Street Scene, London audi-
ences could choose among rival Vesuvian spectacles, including plays,
firework spectaculars, and dioramas.15 That volcanoes continued to be
such excellent box-office was due in no small part to the fact that the
previous year the prolific Edward Lytton Bulwer had penned one of
the most popular narratives of the nineteenth century, The Last Days of
Pompeii. This was a novel that brought together the Pacini and Auber
strands of volcano narrative, and it was to have an influence on all
subsequent volcanic entertainments—fictional, dramatic, operatic,
pyrotechnic, and filmic. Already known for his silver-fork novel, Pelham
(1828), and his Newgate novel, Paul Clifford (1830), in The Last Days
Bulwer put a recent trip to Italy to use to write a historical tale set
around the eruption of 79 CE. Fascinated by the ruins of Pompeii and
the artifacts preserved in the Naples museum, he was primed for his
first encounters with Pompeii as a window onto antiquity by William
Gell, Naples resident and author of Pompeiana (1817–32). (In fact, the
novel is dedicated to Gell, who had also introduced many other British
visitors to Pompeii, including Walter Scott and Bulwer’s friend,
Marguerite Gardiner.) Bulwer’s first sight of Pompeii was also colored
by his encounter in Florence with Karl Briullov’s vast and dramatic
painting, The Last Day of Pompeii (1830–33), which attempts to capture
the moment of destruction. The volcano spews molten lava and belches
black smoke in the background, while in the foreground people flee,
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272 Nicholas Daly
some laden with goods, others attempting to save children and the
infirm; statues topple, and the city itself already looks like a vast tomb.
While Bulwer devotes considerable energy to capturing the details of
everyday life in Pompeii in August, 79 CE, every page moves us toward
a Briullovian moment of disaster.
The Last Days entertains us with a complicated narrative that
features the star-crossed lovers, Glaucus and Ione; the blind slave-girl,
Nydia, who loves Glaucus; and Arbaces, an Egyptian sorcerer and
voluptuary who desires Ione. There is also a subplot, involving Lydon, a
gladiator who fights to free his enslaved father. The Last Days is a
complex commodity-experience, and not only because of its baroque
prose. Philosophically the novel concerns the clash of rival faiths: that
of the sorcerer Arbaces, that of the Athenian Glaucus, and the new
Christian faith of Olinthus. Additionally, Bulwer was keen to produce
a vivid yet footnote-laden account of Pompeii itself, recalling Gell’s
work, though also independent of it (Easson 103–04); in this respect
the novel recalls the nexus of entertainment and education in such
earlier volcanic entertainments as Dubourg’s classical cork models and
Burford’s Panorama.
But our readerly pleasure in the vivid detail of the physical
and philosophical world Bulwer has created is always predicated on
our knowledge that it is about to end. This, after all, is the crucial
aspect of volcano narrative as commodity-experience, and indeed
Bulwer’s elaborate cork model is finally swept away in a tour-de-force
prose performance. Glaucus faces death in the Amphitheater for the
murder of Apaecides, brother of his beloved Ione, but the hungry lion
he confronts senses that something is wrong and retires to his cage.
Thanks to Nydia, a witness appears who clears Glaucus and reveals
Arbaces as the true murderer, but as the bloodthirsty crowd turns on
Arbaces the volcano that has been smoldering ominously in the back-
ground since Chapter 5 of Book I erupts at last:
At that moment they felt the earth shake beneath their feet; the walls of the
theatre trembled: and, beyond in the distance, they heard the crash of falling
roofs; an instant more and the mountain-cloud seemed to roll towards them, dark
and rapid, like a torrent; at the same time, it cast forth from its bosom a shower of
ashes mixed with vast fragments of burning stone! Over the crushing vines—over
the desolate streets—over the amphitheater itself—far and wide—with many a
mighty splash in the agitated sea—fell that awful shower! . . . Each turned to fly—
each dashing, pressing, crushing, against the other. Trampling recklessly over the

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fallen—amidst groans, and oaths, and prayers, and sudden shrieks, the enormous
crowd vomited itself forth through the numerous passages. (3: 246–47)
Glaucus and Ione are guided away from certain death in the smoke-
filled city by the blind Nydia, whose knowledge of the streets does not
depend on visibility. Having saved them, she obligingly drowns herself,
and Glaucus and Ione go to build a new life in Athens, where they
embrace the Christian faith.
As will be readily apparent, Bulwer draws not only on Gell,
Briullov, and his own experience of Pompeii, but on much of the other
Vesuvian material that we have encountered. Among the most obvious
sources are Pacini’s opera (or its various imitations on the London
stage) with its love triangle and equation of populace and volcano,
Moore’s Epicurean with its clash of faiths, Gray’s Vestal with its oppressed
Christians and amphitheater spectacle, and Sumner Lincoln Fair-
field’s Last Night of Pompeii, with its seduction scene, cowed lion, and
Christian lovers who escape to worship their god elsewhere.16 We might
also deduce that Bulwer saw at least some of the popular Vesuvian
entertainments of London as well as John Martin’s apocalyptic canvas.
Whether in spite or because of the fact that in its composition
it is more puddingstone than pure basalt, The Last Days became Bulw-
er’s most successful novel, a hit on the continent (the ODNB mentions
sixteen French impressions by 1864) as well as in Britain and the
United States.17 For contemporary readers part of its power lay in its
ability to bring the city of the dead to life. Indeed, the novel represents
this necromancy as its mission. In its last chapter, the narrator switches
to the near past and describes the skeletons that had been discovered
at Pompeii in vaults and gardens, at the Temple of Isis, and in the
streets—all that remained of those who had been cut down as they
tried to hide from or flee the lethal power of Vesuvius. It was these
“bones and skeletons of those who once moved the springs of that
minute yet gorgeous machine of luxury and of life” that inspired him
to put flesh on history’s bones (424).
There is no reason to doubt that Bulwer did indeed wish to
bring the dead city to life, to reanimate the skeletons, and to reassemble
the disjecta membra of a classical city. But The Last Days is as much a novel
of 1834 as it is of 79 CE. The past is shadowed by the present in various
ways, most obviously by the metaleptic footnotes and narratorial inter-
jections that interrupt the narrative flow to anchor the diegesis to the
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274 Nicholas Daly
narrator’s (and arguably reader’s) present. There are footnotes, for

example, in which the narrator tells us that certain textual details were
inspired by items found at Pompeii and seen by Bulwer at the Museo
Borbonico in Naples (e.g. 126), and others that explain pieces of clas-
sical culture (62, 263). The pleasures of narrative immersion in the
diegetic present, that is, are in tension with the pleasures of heterodi-
egetic knowledge, or historical perspective. Yet some narratorial inter-
jections work to collapse past and present by suggesting continuities
between the classical past and modern Italy. In the chapter that
describes the meeting of Glaucus and his beloved Ione with the Vesu-
vian witch, we are assured, “Perhaps in no country are there seen so
many hags as in Italy—in no country does beauty so awfully change, in
age, to hideousness the most appalling and revolting” (216). Pleasures
too arc across the centuries: the guests at Diomed’s lavish banquet in
Book IV, Chapter 3 are entertained by “one of those nimble [tight-
rope] dancers for which Pompeii was so celebrated, and whose descen-
dants add so charming a grace to the festivities of Astley’s or Vauxhall”
(265). In one of the most curious of these metaleptic moments, our
narrator leaves off a critique of the “unnatural and bloated” (105)
aspect of the Roman empire to make a plea for the virtues of small
states and launch a spirited attack on the unification of Italy (106).18
These metalepses act as a series of hints that, notwithstanding
its attempts to bring ancient Pompeii to life, Bulwer’s novel also provides
a refracted version of the present. In this respect it is hard not to see it as
a novel inspired by the Reform Act of 1832, with its picture of a pleasure-
seeking aristocratic class poised on the verge of extinction at the hands
of seismic forces beyond their control. While Bulwer himself supported
Reform, by the 1830s his first-hand of experience of Italian popular
nationalism had begun to change his mind about popular energies
(Schor 116–32), and the novel represents the crowd as heedless and
bloodthirsty. If the novel never goes as far as La Muette in paralleling
crowd and volcano, it makes the link clear in its most vivid section, the
impassioned description of the eruption that I have quoted: the panicked
mob that “vomit[s] itself forth” from the amphitheater is the human
equivalent of the explosive ash and surging lava vomited forth by the
volcano—unstoppable, bloodthirsty, annihilating all in its path—a
human equivalent to the railway as Charles Dickens would imagine it in
Dombey and Son some thirteen years later. Where La Muette represents
this crowd as a positive revolutionary force, The Last Days portrays it as

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blindly destructive, a mob. The escape of the select few—Glaucus, Ione,

and Nydia—from the volcano/mob in this light seems less of a narrative
of providential Christianity than one of aristocratic selection, since even
the faithful slave Nydia is ultimately removed.
Like other successful novels of the day, Bulwer’s novel was soon
realized in the theater, in such versions as J. B. Buckstone’s The Last Days
of Pompeii; or, Seventeen Hundred Years Ago, a success at the Adelphi, where
it ran for an impressive sixty-four nights in 1834.19 But if Bulwer’s novel,
like many other volcano narratives, is an exercise in dramatic irony that
shows the futility of human plans, his own literary property was reworked
in ways he might not have anticipated or approved. Indeed, in Martin
Meisel’s terms Buckstone’s play was more an independent illustration
than a realization faithful to its original (29–37). Perhaps the most signif-
icant change is that the Adelphi treatment rejects the aristocratic and
spiritual ethos of Bulwer’s novel and switches much of the interest away
from the oppressed Christians and high-society world of Glaucus and
Ione, and onto the gladiators. Lydon’s death in the amphitheater, where
he fights only to free his enslaved father, becomes a major scene, and in
this respect the play inspired many subsequent treatments of the gladi-
ator theme.20 Soon after, the Bowery theater in New York hosted an
American version of Bulwer’s text by Louisa H. Medina, The Last Days of
Pompeii: A Dramatic Spectacle, Taken from Bulwer’s Celebrated Novel of the Same
Name, which opened in February of 1835 and ran for twenty-seven nights.
It has been argued that Medina’s version “rearticulat[es] Bulwer-Lytton’s
narrative in the language of radical republicanism” for its urban working-
class American audience (Yablon 193). But in fact, if the version of this
play printed by Samuel French is accurate, Medina’s play is actually Buck-
stone’s, down to the costume directions for the actors; any republican-
izing had already been done for the audience of the Adelphi in London.
As in Buckstone, Arbaces’s final speech of defiance is the cue for the
volcano to make its entrance. Medina’s stage direction is word-for-word
from Buckstone:
[At this moment, the fire breaks forth from the mountain, and the walls of arena
fall‡‡‡everybody cries. The earthquake‡‡‡the earthquake!‡‡‡Arbaces is
killed by the falling of statue‡‡‡all in confusion and screams till curtain falls
on a grand tableau.] (15)
As one would expect, comic treatments followed too, including a

burlesque, Robert Reece’s Very Last Days of Pompeii (1850, but not
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276 Nicholas Daly
performed until 1872 at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand in

London). The climactic scene (scene 3 in the burletta) lays bare the
devices of the stage volcano. The thwarted Arbaces points to the volcano:
Arbaces. (rising)
Wretched Pompeians, accept my pity.
For see the avenging mountain‡‡‡
[a Man is seen trying to light a squib at the top of mountain]
All. (laughing)
No, it don’t!
Glaucus.
Not till the tag is spoken, friend, it won’t. (25)
Clearly for some the stage-volcano had quite literally become a damp
squib and could only be made to work as parody. But for the most
part, Bulwer’s The Last Days received respectful treatment. The fine
arts responded to the novel with enthusiasm. Examples include
Randolph Rogers’s sculpture, Nydia, The Blind Flower-Girl of Pompeii
(c. 1854), which has been described as the most popular piece of
American sculpture of the nineteenth century, and such paintings as
Alma-Tadema’s Glaucus and Nydia (1857), Paul Falconer Poole’s Escape
of Glaucus and Ione (1860), James Hamilton’s The Last Days of Pompeii
(1864), and perhaps most famously of all Edward Poynter’s Faithful
unto Death (1865). Perhaps not unaware that it was in part reclaiming
its own, opera did not lag behind, and there were at least four treat-
ments: Enrico Petrella’s Ione (1858), Victorin de Joncières Le dernier
jour de Pompéi (1869), George Fox’s Nydia (1892), and Marziano Perosi’s
Pompei (1912).
Nor was Bulwer’s tale forgotten with the advent of cinema:
between 1900 and 1950 no fewer than nine films appeared under that
title or under the Italian title Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompeii (Harris
206–10), as Italy and the US followed Victorian Britain in regarding
themselves in the mirror of the imperial classical past.21 But before
then, in a satisfying return to its own origins in the firework shows of
the eighteenth century, The Last Days appeared in the 1880s as one of
the spectacular pyrodramas or pyrotheatrics pioneered by the Pain
family, firework manufacturers since before the time of Guy Fawkes.
These lavish shows appeared in London and New York before touring
to provincial cities, and they combined grand-scale open-air theater
with dance and other entertainments, always culminating in spectac-

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ular fireworks, generally to represent some scene of death and destruc-

tion: e.g. The Siege of Vera Cruz, Paris and the Commune, and The Siege of
Sebastopol. In New York, where it was part of a more general embrace
of imperial pageantry (see Malamud 64–66), The Last Days of Pompeii
was first performed in June 1885, to a crowd of over a thousand at
Manhattan Beach (later shows would draw up to 10,000). It featured a
full-size Temple of Isis and Palace of Arbaces and a landscaped lagoon
with barges, all in the shadow of Vesuvius. As the New York Times
reported:
Before the Temple stands an army of mail-clad warriors, with glittering weapons
and armor, before whom passes a procession of priests, dancing girls, Senators,
and slaves, all in brilliant and fanciful costumes, escorting Arbaces, who walks
under a gorgeous canopy. . . . There are foot races, acrobatic performances,
dancing by the fantastically attired girls, and then a confused combat, in the
midst of which Vesuvius vomits forth a volume of lava; there is a tremendous earth-
quake, the buildings totter and fall, the populace rushes wildly about, and chaos is
wrought in very short order. (“A Drama”)
As David Mayer has shown, while one of the features of later

shows was the realization of well-known Pompeii paintings (such as
Poynter’s Faithful), some of the lavish backdrop of the pyrodrama later
appeared in the Kalem film, Ben Hur (1907), a nice example of how
Fig. 2. “Fireworks at Manhattan Beach—The Last Days of Pompeii.” Harper’s Weekly

29.1492 (25 July 1885): 476.
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278 Nicholas Daly
new cultural forms can cannibalize not just narrative content, but
actual mise-en-scène from older rivals (Mayer, “Last Days” 99). The
Pain family also staged The Last Days at Alexandra Palace in Muswell
Hill, North London, building up the Christian subplot of the novel
with material culled from George Whyte-Melville’s The Gladiators, and
later Wilson Barrett’s The Sign of the Cross (1895); the expansive form
also incorporated contemporary variety crazes, such as bicycling. From
the US, we have a detailed account of the Pains’ pyrodramatic perfor-
mance at Fort Worth, Texas, in October 1890, which suggests that
Bulwer’s clash of faiths had evolved into a species of vigorous Christian
pageantry in which Olinthus, armed with a good-sized fiery cross, faces
down the evil magician Arbaces (Jones 73–86). Where Bulwer had
transformed the commodity-experience of the volcano by turning it
into a vehicle for comparative religion, a textbook on domestic life in a
Roman town, and an allegory of unbridled democracy, in the Pains’
show, the spectacular overwhelms The Last Days and reduces its
elevating ambitions to a few bare bones. The real hero becomes, once
again, the volcano as spectacle, and the chorus line of dancing girls
and colorfully clad Pompeiians seems a celebration of the crowd as
well as a democratic commercial entertainment, more circus than clas-
sical tableau.
I have tried to give an account here of a particular type of
polymodal volcanic entertainment, or commodity-experience, as it
develops from firework spectacular to indoor show, and from canvas to
page, stage, and celluloid, as well as back to the pyrotechnic spectac-
ular. This is not a comprehensive account of the representation of
volcanoes; there are other sorts of narratives upon which I have not
impinged at all. There are, for example, the “hollow-earth” adventure
novels that develop from John Cleves Symmes’s Symzonia (1820): Edgar
Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Jules
Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Bulwer’s own The Coming
Race (1871), and H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887)—to say nothing of
Blofeld’s volcanic lair in You Only Live Twice (1967). All of these feature
volcanic portals or volcanic dwelling places, but suggest a very different
trend of fantasy and a different poetics of space; most crucially, they
are not structured around anticipated disaster.22 If these narratives
link the volcano with the landscape of the unconscious, there is also a
more emphatically psychosexual aspect of volcanoes that I have not
discussed except insofar as it touches upon the early-modern associa-

54.228.195.183 on Wed, 12 Dec 2018 12:29:53 UTC
Fig. 3. Illustrated cover to program for Cabiria (1914, author’s own collection).
tion between volcano spectacles and the potency of the ruler. This too
has a long line of descendants in popular culture, from the playful
lyrics of Funiculi Funicula (1880) to the lava lamp. And then there is the
more philosophical volcano, the void into which Empedocles hurtles
himself, thus returning himself to the elements, in Matthew Arnold’s
Empedocles on Etna (1852).23
winter 2011

54.228.195.183 on Wed, 12 Dec 2018 12:29:53 UTC
280 Nicholas Daly
The rather different volcano disaster narratives that I have

considered here have enjoyed considerable longevity as a component
of first European elite and ultimately international popular culture,
aided by their ability to spread across media and genres and to mutate
to accommodate new political content while remaining consistent in
their representation of fiery death and destruction. The Forge of Vulcan
and its successors is a vision, albeit a somewhat reified one, of the
powers unleashed by the industrial and French revolutions; the volcano
shows, operas, and novels of the 1820s and 1830s register the political
instability of those years.
As we have seen, in a major strain of the volcanic commodity-
experience there is only annihilation, even for the virtuous: Pacini’s
L’Ultimo giorno, The Vestal, some of the versions of Masaniello, and many
of the paintings all follow this pattern. Even in those versions in which
the survival of the few is important, the representation of the moment
of destruction is still a significant component, and perhaps even offers
greater pleasure for the spectator or reader. Thus while a historicizing
reading of such disaster narratives suggests that the volcano can func-
tion as a screen-threat for other forces—such as the crowd, as I have
suggested—we should not be too quick to read beyond the fascination
with the sublime moment of devastation, with its toppling buildings,
fiery showers of pyroclastics, yawning trenches, and human immola-
tion. To this extent the incendiary pleasures of the eighteenth-century
fireworks show never entirely disappear.
University College, Dublin
NOTES
1
This pattern is traceable from thirties disaster films like Deluge (1933) and San
Francisco (1936), to those of the Cold War era, e.g. The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959)
and The Day of the Triffids (1962, based on John Wyndham’s 1951 novel), to contemporary
narratives of ecological apocalypse like The Day after Tomorrow (2004). For a reading of the
disaster films of the 1990s in these terms, see Kakoudaki. For a reading of modern images
of disaster as part of a post-Christian imaginary, see Landow, Images of Crisis.
2
On the “popular hero,” see Bennett and Woollacott.
3
On the “commodity-experience” as an aspect of modern culture that develops
throughout the period I am discussing, see Friedberg 3, 7, and 55–57.
4
On the evolution of the franchise, see Surrell.
As Brock notes of Paris in the wake of the Orsini assassination attempt in
5
1858, and Moscow in 1881 (81, 102).

54.228.195.183 on Wed, 12 Dec 2018 12:29:53 UTC
6
Other connotations exist too: the first use of fireworks on the British stage was
probably in the representation of Hell Mouth in medieval Mystery Plays (Butterworth
3–5).
7
Such shows enjoyed similar popularity in France during the years of revolu-
tion, presumably in part for their political symbolism (Fulcher 36).
8
Wright also painted such firework-paintings as Firework Display at the Castel
Sant’Angelo (c. 1774–75). Comparing the volcano and Girandola, he wrote, “the one is
the greatest of Nature the other of Art that I suppose can be.” A critic reviewing the
1778 Royal Academy exhibition described a pair of volcano and Girandola paintings by
Wright as “wonderful examples of sublimity” (qtd. in Salatino 49).
9
As evidence of the democratization of the grand tour, we might note that by
the 1860s, a country doctor’s daughter, like Lucilla in Margaret Oliphant’s Miss
Marjoribanks (1866) could plausibly be represented as planning to “go up Vesuvius”
(Oliphant 18).
10
On the Victorian use of the classical past, see Jenkyns; Landow, “Victorian-
ized Romans.”
11
For reviews, see “Adelphi Theatre” and “Adelphi.”
12
The scene also looks forward to the deaths of two other monsters: Varney, in
James Malcolm Rymer’s long-running serial Varney the Vampire (1845–47), and Alan
Raby in Dion Boucicault’s The Phantom (1856, a reworking of his earlier The Vampire
[1852]), in which the permanent destruction of the vampire, Alan Raby, is secured
when Dr. Reese throws his body down an abyss on Mount Snowdon—itself an extinct
volcano—where the reviving effects of moonlight cannot reach.
13
Unlike Bulwer, in his footnotes Fairfield points to the pornographic material
in the Museo Borbonico as evidence of Pompeian depravity.
14
Versions of the Masaniello story remained popular long after the 1820s, and
as Gerald Finley has argued they presumably inspired J. M. W. Turner’s painting,
Undine Giving the Ring to Massaniello (1846, Finley 178–82).
15
See Skaerved 22. Parry’s painting advertises Buckstone’s drama, The Last Days
of Pompeii, at the Adelphi, and “The Destruction of Pompeii,” possibly a diorama at the
Egyptian Hall. The Surrey Zoological Gardens featured Vesuvius and Mount Etna fire-
work shows in 1837–38, 1846, and 1852 (Brock 67).
16
Fairfield, editor of the American Monthly Magazine, had sent a copy of his poem
to Bulwer according to a contemporary review that also details Bulwer’s borrowings
(“The Last Days” 453–54).
17
On the novel’s early continental success, see Victor Bulwer-Lytton, Life 1: 445.
As Isaac Disraeli put it in a letter to the author: “They will be no more the last days . . . we
can enter the city when we choose. . . . I was present at the tremendous tragedy of
nature—a trembling spectator, and I watched . . . till I was overcome by the phantasma,
and I was glad to find myself once more in the solitude of my armchair” (Bulwer-Lytton
444).
18
Alessandro Manzoni’s influential, proto-nationalist novel, I Promessi Sposi
(1827), had been translated into English as early as 1828. Like The Last Days it deals with
the attempts by a powerful figure to block the marriage of two lovers, though its histor-
ical backdrop is seventeenth-century northern Italy.
winter 2011

54.228.195.183 on Wed, 12 Dec 2018 12:29:53 UTC
282 Nicholas Daly
19
Other London versions included one by Edward Fitzball, The Last Days of
Pompeii:, or, The Blind Girl of Tessaly (1835). For a review, see “Victoria.”
20
For a contemporary review that is particularly pleased with the gladiators, see
“Adelphi Theatre.” The Examiner for its part felt that the organic wholeness of Bulwer’s
novel had suffered greatly in being turned into “a melo-drama” (“Adelphi” 2).
21
Not all of these closely followed Bulwer. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B.
Schoedsack’s Last Days (1935), for example, is centered on Marcus, a blacksmith-
turned-gladiator who in the end discovers that riches are not everything; it is in essence
a Depression-era boxing movie in classical garb.
22
The portal to the underground world of the Vril-ya is not a volcano per se, but
a volcanic chasm deep within a mine, but it is nonetheless tempting to see The Coming
Race as Bulwer’s late-career reworking of The Last Days.
Late Victorian volcano narratives include R. M. Ballantyne’s Blown to Bits
23
(1889) and Grant Allen’s tongue-in-cheek disaster story, “The Thames Valley Catas-
trophe” (1897). Thanks to Will Tattersdill for bringing the latter to my attention.
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The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage

Author(s): Nicholas Daly

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victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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the volcano’s representational adventures recall the “remediation”

The Early Years: Volcano Shows

The volcano as entertainment erupts first not onto the page or

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Renaissance, when, as Kevin Salatino notes, monarchs and other

victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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figures as William Hamilton, British ambassador to the court of Naples

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victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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boundary between the educational and the entertaining. William

Volcanoes did not roar in popular spectacle alone. While they

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victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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the disaster, and only in occasional paralepses do we get a glimpse of

Where are now the hapless crowds

The cameos of individuals—the Roman soldier who is briefly reunited

victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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whose advances are spurned by the virtuous wife of the magistrate,

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liberal adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Henry M.

victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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transfers the 79 CE eruption to the second persecution of Christians

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A roar, as if a myriad thunders burst,

One thought, one action swayed the tossing crowd.

Pompeii is destroyed but the Christians escape to freedom, brands

victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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The Fires of Revolution

By the 1830s, then, the volcano narrative was available to the

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is the objective correlative for the energies of revolution and of the

victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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reputedly ignited the Belgian Revolution against William I, King of the

The Last Days

By 1835, as suggested by the advertising posters in John Parry’s

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victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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narrator’s (and arguably reader’s) present. There are footnotes, for

victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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blindly destructive, a mob. The escape of the select few—Glaucus, Ione,

As one would expect, comic treatments followed too, including a

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performed until 1872 at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand in

victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 2

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ular fireworks, generally to represent some scene of death and destruc-