Years ago I found in an old book shop a cache of cheap portfolios of art reproductions, organized mainly by painter. They were intended, I think, for home study or possibly even for framing, but I used several of them to make sets of table placemats as gifts for friends and relatives. I remember particularly a Marc Chagall set for my son Luke; we ourselves have a set of Giottos, now a little worse for wear. A recent deep dive in a glory-hole storage room came upon the preparations, two decades now in abeyance, for a set I had entirely forgotten: reproduced scenes from the famous two-thousand-year-old domestic murals in Pompeii. This discovery became a link in a chain of Lockian associated ideas now yearning to blog forth in various channels, including the sex life of the ancients, old novels, random Internet correspondents, and the comparative cultural levels of chief executives in the United States and Great Britain—all joining, naturally, in a single symphony of commodious congruence.
Knebworth House
Three years ago we—Joan and I and our good friend John Logan, one of the senior bibliographers in the Firestone Library—led an alumni tour entitled “Great Libraries and Literature of England.” The title could have been supplemented by “and a Few Great Cathedrals and a Pub or Two”. Our “Princeton Journeys” leader was a wonderful young woman who had worked with an enterprising travel outfit to supplement the itinerary with numerous extra sites of literary interest, such as the Dickens Museum in London and various specialized book sellers. One or two of these were places I never would have dreamed of, such as Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, a stately country home in the league of Downton Abbey, and the ancestral domicile of the politician and wildly successful Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a contemporary and friend. of Dickens. As you know from Downton Abbey such places are impossibly expensive to maintain, and the supply of American heiresses having dried up, most of them have been torn down or repurposed long ago. But the current master of Knebworth, an enterprising and imaginative Bulwer descendant, has kept Knebworth going thanks to his energy and entrepreneurial skills. His house is now a major venue for rock concerts, among other popular events. I am sure that literary tours like ours are a very small part of the income stream.
I think it is safe to say that Bulwer Lytton is not widely read today. To the extent he is known at all, it is probably unfairly in connection with a burlesque literary competition held each year to ascertain the worst opening line of a novel. The opening sentence of one of his novels (Paul Clifford) begins It was a dark and stormy night, and staggers on for fifty more words. Actually, I don’t think it’s all that bad a sentence; but when Snoopy from Peanuts launched his literary career with it, the die was cast. I don’t know if any living soul has read Paul Clifford, but I can boast of having read two other Bulwer-Lytton titles. The first was Eugene Aram, which featured in a piece in my “Rogue Scholar” series. The other, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), is probably his best and best-known. It really is pretty good: intrigue, good guys, bad guys, lubricity, Christians, lions, and of course one hell of an awesome volcano. Art engenders art. Bulwer-Lytton had been inspired to take up his theme after viewing the huge, lurid painting, famous in its day, by the Russian artist Bryuillov. Later, Hollywood would find inspiration in Bulwer-Lytton. The Last Days of Pompeii has many elements favored by the makers of celluloid epics, and they gave it the full treatment. In addition to the slave markets, gladiatorial combats, and over-the-top dinner parties, it also has a noble lover named Glaucus, and an even more noble lass of the servile class, the blind flower-girl Nydia, doomed, of course, to sacrifice her own happiness for the aristos.
But, back to the lubricity part. The name of the city, Pompeii, has nothing to do with Pompey the Great, as I had witlessly imagined. It derives from a non-Latin word for five, the number of the town’s ancient subdivisions; but it might just as well have been called Phallusopolis, so copious are the surviving images of the aroused male member in paint, ceramic, stone, and ivory in both domestic and public settings to be found among the ruins--though not in my more chaste set of unfinished placemats, of course. On this topic I recommend with enthusiasm a Youtube lecture by the eminent Cambridge classicist, Professor Mary Beard*. She charmingly refers to this organ as the Willie, greatly to be preferred to John Thomas, the term of art in currency at the historically Welsh college I myself attended at Oxford. So I suppose Williamsburg might also do.
Edward Bulwer-Litton was a busy man, splitting his time between his London townhouse and his rural stately home, and frequently traveling abroad. He was an active Member of Parliament for many years, and his talents by no means went unrecognized. He had the distinction—rare, I should think, if not in fact unique, of declining an invitation to take up the throne of Greece. Ah, those were the days! In the 1850s he was Secretary of State for the Colonies, no minor position. He made pots of money from his writing, but he lived the Victorian Nightmare as well as the Victorian Dream, as his wife went mad and, while not actually confined to the attic, was a cause of great difficulty and distress.
I was already lamenting privately within myself that we in America probably do not have in in our elected legislative body or our presidential cabinets people who have published twenty novels and declined royal thrones when I accidentally came upon evidence of a dramatic difference in what might be called the cultural profiles of chief executives on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Still pursuing Roman archaeology, I came upon a televised debate in the“Intelligence Squared” format between Mary Beard and Boris Johnson, at the time the Mayor of London and now of course Prime Minister of Great Britain. The somewhat whimsical topic was “Greece vs Rome”. I offer no spoiler alert because I have no intention of spoiling anything. I encourage you to watch it for yourself, if possible recalling in your mind as you do so the general tenor of the first debate between the incumbent Republican president and his Democratic challenger on September 30, 2020. It was a dark and stormy night.
