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the form of the blind slave girl who has always operated in darkness and has learned to navigate her way through the town. After justice is meted out to Arbaces in the form of a large column that crushes him to death, the protagonists are led to the shore and escape on a boat. Nydia, feeling that she cannot compete with Ione, and indeed does not deserve Glaucus after giving him the poisonous draught, jumps overboard. Glaucus and Ione marry, convert to Christianity and live happily ever after.
    Bulwer-Lytton based this book on extensive research at Pompeii in 1832 – 33. He was inspired to create the character of Nydia as a result of a conversation with an expert on the ruins, who suggested that a blind person who knew their way around Pompeii would have had the best chance to escape the eruption. 59 One of the key devices employed by Bulwer-Lytton was the use of skeletons that he saw in situ or heard about when he was conducting his study as the basis for a number of the characters in the novel. He re-animated these skeletons and gave them characters of his own invention and interpreted their last moments from their positions and associated artefacts. 60 The character of the foreign villain, Arbaces, was based on a victim whose body appeared to have been severed by a falling column. Under the influence of Spurzheim, one of the founders of the so-called science of phrenology, it was determined that the skull of this individual displayed remarkable intellectual properties, along with a propensity for evil. 61
    The character of Julia was inspired by the form of a woman that had been preserved in the ash in the so-called Villa of Diomedes. Her father, Diomed, was drawn from a skeleton found in the vicinity of a bag of coins in the portico of the garden. The skeleton was reported to have had an iron key in one hand and a gold ring on a finger. Burbo, a minor character, was created from the axe-wielding priest in the Temple of Isis myth and Calenus was based on the skeleton found near the sack full of treasures taken from the temple. 62 It is notable that though Bulwer-Lytton employed the skeletons from a number of famous myths, including the faithful sentry near the Herculaneum Gate, he did not mention the salacious story of the woman in the gladiators’ barracks. The repopulation of the site with re-animated corpses and with purely imagined individuals, often inhabiting houses that could be identified by any visitor to the site, contributed to the success of the novel and had a long-reaching impact on the interpretation of human remains destroyed by the AD 79 eruption.
The objecti fi cation of the objects of his desire: Theophile Gautier and Arria Marcella
    Bulwer-Lytton was by no means the only author who used these devices in their reconstruction of Pompeian life and death. Shortly after his novel appeared, he was accused of plagiarism by Sumner Lincoln Fairfield, an American writer who had produced a lengthy poem called The Last Night of Pompeii in 1832. 63 A better-known work that utilized the Bulwer-Lytton approach, and even some of the same bodies, was Theophile Gautier’s Arria Marcella , which was published in 1852. Though not as influential as The Last Days of Pompeii , Gautier’s piece is worth recounting.
    The story opens with a visit to the finds from Pompeii in the Naples Museum by three French tourists, Octavian and his friends Fabio and Max. Octavian is smitten by the impression of a woman’s bosom and hip preserved in the compacted ash. This leads to a reverie about how entire ancient cultures had been lost, whilst the form of these mammaries had survived the millennia. 64
    The friends then continue on to Pompeii where they procure a guide. As part of the tour, the guide takes the visitors to the Villa of Diomedes and shows them the exact spot where the cast of the woman they had viewed in the museum was found. The guide’s description moves Octavian so that:
    His breast heaved, his eyes were moist; the