Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the earth was hot, cooling and alive with geological movements
that produced earthquakes, tectonic plate shifting, volcanoes and
huge waves. His own energies took him temporarily away from
geology and into Parliament, where he was the silent member for
Stroud for more than 30 years: 'a parliamentary reputation is like
a woman's', he wrote: 'it must be exposed as little as possible'.¹³
Scrope beat into print the eminent geologist Charles Lyell,
whose
Principles of Geology
appeared in two volumes in 1830 and
1832. This proposed the theory of 'uniformism' which allowed
that the earth had been cooling and forming over an immense
length of time, creating volcanoes to relieve the pressures. Lyell
was also quietly spoken, for all his skill as a lecturer: Emma
Darwin, the wife of Charles Darwin, observed that 'Mr Lyell is
enough to flatten a party, as he never speaks above his breath, so
that everybody keeps lowering their tone to his.'¹4
These two quiet men set the tone for nineteenth-century
studies of volcanoes. A third influence was the vain, effete, aristo-
cratic and noisy figure of the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
By the time he came to write
The Last Days of Pompeii
(published
1834) Bulwer Lytton had been described as 'without doubt, the
most popular writer now living'.¹5 Highly prolific and with an eye
for a lavish storyline, Bulwer Lytton began his novel of high-
waymen,
Paul Clifford
(1830), with the phrase 'It was a dark and
stormy night', thus introducing a new cliché into English story-
telling. Visiting Italy in 1833 with his wife, with whom he had a
violent and volcanic marriage, Bulwer Lytton came home five
months later with the manuscript of
The Last Days of Pompeii
in his bag. He and his wife promptly separated.¹6 This dramatic
tale of daily life in Pompeii, with its decadence, extremes of wealth
and poverty, a story of forbidden love, and impending Christian
martyrdom, reached a climax with the convenient eruption of
Vesuvius and the destruction of the city. The story was not entirely
Bulwer Lytton's own, however: the fate of Pompeii had been a
melancholy theme in European literature and drama since exca-
vations began in the mid-eighteenth century. Notably, Giovanni
Pacini's opera
L'ultimo giorno di Pompei
was already in the Italian
repertoire, having been first performed in Naples in 1825.¹7
