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WILLIAM GELL AND POMPEIANA (1817–19 AND 1832)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

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Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the preparation, publication and reception of the two separate versions of William Gell's Pompeiana, texts that exercised a formative influence over Victorian understanding of not just Roman Pompeii, but of domestic Roman life more broadly throughout the nineteenth century, and that highlight a transition from eighteenth-century antiquarianism to a more ‘archaeological’ approach to the past in the nineteenth century. Using unpublished correspondence that has been overlooked by other scholarship on Gell, it argues that the form and content of the volumes responded to both contemporary fascination with the history of domestic life and the need for an affordable volume on Pompeii. But the volumes also reflected many of Gell's more personal interests, developed in a career of travelling in Greece, Asia Minor and Spain, and were a product of his circumstances: they were conceived in order that Gell (and his coadjutor John Peter Gandy in the first edition) might earn much-needed additional income, and were a means through which Gell could consolidate his social position in Naples by establishing his authoritative expertise on Pompeii.

L'articolo offre un'analisi della preparazione, pubblicazione e ricezione delle due diverse versioni dei Pompeiana, testi che hanno esercitato un ruolo di primo piano per la comprensione della Pompei romana non solo in età vittoriana, ma anche più in generale nel XIX secolo in relazione alla conoscenza della vita quotidiana romana. Essi hanno inoltre contribuito alla transizione dall'antiquaria del XVIII secolo a un approccio più ‘archeologico’ dello studio del passato nel corso del XIX secolo. Tramite l'analisi di corrispondenza inedita, fino ad oggi trascurata negli studi su Gell, nel saggio si sostiene come la forma e il contenuto dei volumi corrispondessero sia all'interesse del tempo per la storia quotidiana sia al bisogno di un volume accessibile su Pompei. Ma i volumi riflettono anche molti degli interessi personali di Gell, sviluppati nei suoi viaggi in Grecia, Asia Minore e Spagna, e possono essere considerati in buona sostanza prodotti delle circostanze: erano infatti stati ideati così che Gell (e il suo co-autore John Peter Gandy nella prima edizione) potessero guadagnare un reddito aggiuntivo assai utile. Erano inoltre mezzi attraverso i quali Gell poteva consolidare la sua posizione sociale in Napoli, grazie alla sua autorevole competenza su Pompei.

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Copyright © British School at Rome 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Society of Antiquaries and by a period of study leave awarded by the University of Leicester. I am grateful to both institutions. I would also like to thank the staff of Derbyshire Record Office and Valerie Scott of the British School at Rome for their assistance, and Penelope Allison, Katy Layton Jones, Phillip Lindley and Sarah Scott for commenting on earlier drafts of this article.

References

1 E. Lazer, Resurrecting Pompeii (London, 2009), 8.

2 See, for example, A. Easson, ‘‘At home’ with the Romans: domestic archaeology in The Last Days of Pompeii’, in A.C. Christensen (ed.), The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections (Cranbury (NJ), 2004), 100–15; Goldhill, S., ‘A writer's things: Bulwer-Lytton and the archaeological gaze: or, what's in a skull?’, Representations 119 (Summer 2012), 92118 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. Harrison, ‘Bulwer Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii: recreating the city’, in S. Hales and J. Paul (eds), Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today (Oxford, 2011), 70–90; St Clair, W. and Bautz, A., ‘Imperial decadence: the making of myths in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii ’, Victorian Literature and Culture 40 (2012), 359–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 An exception is Desrochers, B., ‘Images de Pompéi’, Canadian Art Review 27 (1–2) (2000), 5972 Google Scholar, but she focused exclusively upon the images, excluding the text and the images’ relationship to the text, in her analysis.

4 There is some discussion of Gell's depiction of the wall-paintings in C.L. Lyons and M. Reed, ‘The visible and the visual: Pompeii and Herculaneum in the Getty Research Institute Collections’, in V.C. Gardner Coates and J.L. Syedl (eds), Antiquity Recovered. The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum (Los Angeles, 2007), 133–56.

5 See, for example, J. Harris, Pompeii Awakened: a Story of Rediscovery (London, 2009), 160–1, where, among other inaccuracies, she identified Gell incorrectly as the representative of the Dilettanti Society from 1820. See also M.D. Bridges, ‘Objects of affection: necromantic pathos in Bulwer Lytton's City of the Dead’, in Hales and Paul (eds), Pompeii in the Public Imagination (above, n. 2), 92, who referred to him as a ‘geologist’ and attributed the illustrations solely to Gandy. E. Dwyer, Pompeii's Living Statues. Ancient Roman Lives Stolen from Death (Ann Arbor, 2010), 22, has dismissed Gell as out of touch with archaeological opinion beyond Naples and Pompeiana as full of ‘idiosyncratic conjectures’ (without providing examples).

6 As noted, there were two distinct and different texts called Pompeiana: the Topography, Edifices, and Ornaments of Pompeii, published in 1817–19 and 1832 respectively. Pompeiana (1817–19) was printed in a new edition in 1821, when the text was slightly reordered in the interests of internal coherence and an appendix added; the 1825 impression was textually unchanged. It was reissued again in 1835, 1852 and 1875. Pompeiana (1832) was reprinted only once, in 1837.

7 E. Clay (ed.), Sir William Gell in Italy (London, 1976), 64. The conditions of secrecy imposed by the restored Bourbon monarchy prohibited taking notes or sketches in situ. Gell's observations therefore (as he was aware) have considerable value for classical archaeologists and art historians today, as few other observations were taken on the spot, and many finds subsequently were allowed to disintegrate through exposure to the elements. The unusual accuracy of his drawings in a period before the advent of photography, rendered possible by his use of the camera lucida, also enhances their value. See, for example, Pompeiana (1832), I, xxiii.

8 This volume was the one on which, above all others, Gell seems to have staked his scholarly identity and reputation: he prided himself on his accuracy and for having broken genuinely new ground in surveying territory and archaeological sites that had not been recorded previously, and for having documented the physical evidence of the locations of many sites recorded in the early history of Rome that were in danger of disappearing altogether. For a recent and positive evaluation of this publication, see A. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Roman topography and the prism of Sir William Gell’, in L. Haselberger and J. Humphrey (eds), Imaging Ancient Rome. Documentation, Visualization, Imagination (Portsmouth (RI), 2006), 285–96.

9 See, for example, the original entry by Warwick Wroth on Gell in the Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1889), and J. Ramsay, ‘A sketch of the character of Sir William Gell’, in F.F. Madden (ed.), The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington, 3 vols (London, 1855), II, 15–21. For a recent and more positive assessment of Gell's scholarly reputation see the revised entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) by Jason Thompson, and his evaluation of his contribution to Egyptology in J. Thompson, Sir Gardner Wilkinson and his Circle (Austin, 1992). The Italians, French and Germans with whom he engaged on an antiquarian rather than sociable basis, such as Antonio Nibby, Jean-François Champollion and Christian Charles Josias Bunsen, appear to have had a higher estimation of his contribution to scholarship. Amongst the honours that he received were membership of the Royal Academy of Berlin, the Institut de France and the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica.

10 See, for example, M. Beard, ‘Taste and the antique: visiting Pompeii in the nineteenth century’, in C. Mattusch (ed.), Rediscovering the Ancient World on the Bay of Naples, 1710–1890 (New Haven (CT), 2013), 205–28; the essays in Hales and Paul (eds), Pompeii in the Public Imagination (above, n. 2); I. Rowland, From Pompeii: the Afterlife of a Roman Town (Harvard, 2014); and six of the essays in Gardner Coates and Syedl (eds), Antiquity Recovered (above, n. 4). Göran Blix's study of French interpretations of Pompeii in the context of romanticism's engagement with the past, which highlights the role of Pompeii in the shift from neoclassical to archaeological approaches to antiquity, is a valuable exception to this pattern: G. Blix, From Paris to Pompeii. French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology (Philadelphia, 2009).

11 See, for example, A. Miller, Letters from Italy, 2 vols (London, 1776), II, 252–85 on Pompeii, and pp. 285–301 on Portici, or the diary of Sir James Hall, National Library of Scotland [hereafter NLS] MS 6327 fols 47–58.

12 For an overview of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century comments on Herculaneum, see C. Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii and Stabiae (Cambridge, 1995), and A. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Ruins and forgetfulness: the case of Herculaneum’, in Hales and Paul (eds), Pompeii in the Public Imagination (above, n. 2), 367–79.

13 A. Cooley, Pompeii (London, 2003), 73–9. See, for example, the five plates and accompanying discussion in J.C. Richard de Saint Non, Voyage pittoresque ou descriptions des royaumes de Naples et de Sicilie, 5 vols (Paris, 1781–6), II, 115–24.

14 J. Chetwode Eustace, A Classical Tour through Italy, 4 vols, fourth edition (Leghorn, 1818), III, 69; R. Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: the British in Italy, c. 1680–1820 (Cambridge, 2012), 47–50.

15 Hamilton, W., ‘An account of the discoveries at Pompeii’, Archaeologia 4 (1776), 160–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saint Non, Voyage pittoresque (above, n. 13), II, chapter 10.

16 Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour (above, n. 14), 148.

17 M. Starke, Letters from Italy between the Years 1792 and 1798, 2 vols (London, 1800), II, 101; Chetwode Eustace, Classical Tour (above, n. 14), III, 54–5. Bulwer Lytton drew on these stories in his account of the cynical exploitation of the cult of Isis by the Egyptian priest Arbaces in The Last Days of Pompeii.

18 See, for example, R. Gray, Letters during the Course of a Tour through Germany, Switzerland and Italy, in the Years MDCCXCI and MDCCXCII (London, 1794), 410–11.

19 J. Moore, A View of Society and Manners in Italy, 2 vols (London, 1781), II, 176; Journal of Sir James Hall, March 1785, NLS MS 6237 fols 24, 26; journal of William Forbes, 7 March 1793, NLS MS 1542 fol. 4; journal of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, December 1789, Cambridge University Library [hereafter CUL] Add MS 3550 fol. 5.

20 Pompeiana (1819), x. See also Cooley, Pompeii (above, n. 13), 80–2.

21 Eclectic Review 14 (September 1820), 146.

22 See Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour (above, n. 14), 104–7.

23 D. Romanelli, Viaggio a Pompei a Pesto e di ritorno ad Ercolano ed a Pozzuoli, second edition (Naples, 1817), 12. The first edition of Carlo Bonucci's widely consulted Pompei descritta did not appear until 1824.

24 COPAC (http://copac.ac.uk/) provides details of five copies of the 1811 edition and seven of the 1817 edition in British research libraries.

25 Desrochers, ‘Images de Pompéi’ (above, n. 3), 63–4.

26 F. Mazois, Les ruines de Pompéi dessinées et mesurées par F. Mazois pendant les années MDCCCIX. MDCCCX. MDCCCXI, 4 vols (Paris, 1812–38), I, part 2, plate 1. For a discussion of Mazois's approach to domestic life amongst the ancient Romans, and his reliance on Vitruvius, see A. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Case e società’, in P.G. Guzzo (ed.), Pompei scienza e società (Milan, 2001), 113–17.

27 British Library [hereafter BL] Add MS 63617 fol. 57, Cockerell to Gell, 13 February 1817.

28 Derbyshire Record Office [hereafter DRO] D258/50/146 Gell wrote to his brother, 30 March 1831, regarding a collection of pedigrees that he described as having been completed by him by 1795. See also D258/50/134 on the same subject, 15 April 1830. Gell suggested that Blore had appropriated some of his own collections.

30 R. Winsor Liscombe, William Wilkins, 1778–1839 (Cambridge, 1980), chapter 1.

31 University of Bristol Special Collections MSS 7–8.

32 Bodleian Library Oxford MS Eng misc e. 154.

33 As Gell never published anything relating to his travels in Spain and Portugal, his interest in the Iberian peninsula and Moorish history and culture hitherto has been overlooked. His notebooks with sketches relating to these tours survive at the British School at Rome and in sketchbook 12 from Keppel Craven's bequest of Gell's sketchbooks at the British Museum. His correspondence with the Countess of Blessington shows that he returned to these Spanish notebooks, and the history of the Moors in particular, towards the end of his life, when he was trying to identify new topics on which to write that would appeal to a wider audience and would earn him additional income. See Madden (ed.), Literary Life and Correspondence (above, n. 9), II, 5–6, 53, 81, 91. See also DRO D258/58/3/1–4 (extracts from various books relating to the Moors of Granada).

34 W. Gell, The Topography of Troy, and its Vicinity (London, 1804); The Geography and Antiquities of Ithaca (London, 1807); The Itinerary of Greece (London, 1810).

35 Lady Charlotte Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV, 2 vols, second edition (Paris, 1838), passim.

36 DRO D258/50/ 71, D258/50/86, D258/100 and D258/101, letters to his brother dated 12 May 1814, 20 September 1815, 1 February 1819 and March 1816 respectively. His brother, Phillip Gell, was MP for Penryn, and was known to the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, through the patron of his former seat of Malmesbury, Thomas Grimston Estcourt. William Gell clearly hoped that his brother might be able to exert some influence on his behalf. http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/gell-philip-1775-1842 (last consulted 31.12.2014).

37 DRO D258/50/99, Gell wrote to Sidmouth, through Philip Gell, petitioning to be appointed Governor of the Ionian islands, 17 December 1815. See also DRO D3287/4/5, Letters of Caroline of Brunswick to William Gell: a letter from October 1818 referred to commitments on Caroline's part to press Gell's interests with her daughter, Princess Charlotte, as a future Minister of Naples, and a letter of 1820 shows that Gell was still angling to be appointed Governor of the Ionian islands.

38 G. Gordon, Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (London, 1810), 90. Although they did not meet in Greece, Gell and Byron certainly would have encountered each other through Princess Caroline; Gell was well acquainted with Byron's friend and travelling companion John Cam Hobhouse: Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV (above, n. 35), I, 223.

39 Beinecke Library Osborne d293 fol. 125, journal of William Gell, 31 May 1815. F. Fraser, The Unruly Queen. The Life of Queen Caroline (London, 1996), 271, mistakenly assumed that Gell remained behind in Naples after the departure of Princess Caroline in March 1815. On the contrary, he accompanied her north through Rome to Genoa and thence to Milan.

40 Beinecke Library Osborne d293 fols 83–5, journal of William Gell, 6–9 February 1815; DRO D3287/4/5, Caroline of Brunswick to Gell, 8 February 1815; D258/50/82, Gell to his banker, Stracey, 9 March 1815, explained that he would not be joining the princess on her summer tour of Italy due to the problems he had experienced with gout over the winter. Lady Charlotte Bury, however, referred to a bitter quarrel between the princess, Gell and Keppel Craven: Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV (above, n. 35), II, 134, 138.

41 DRO D258/50/84 and 85, William Gell to his brother Philip Gell, 14 July and 1 September 1815; D258/50/107 Gell to Mary Polier, July 1815.

42 F. Salmon, Building on Ruins. The Rediscovery of Rome and English Architecture (Aldershot, 2000), 82.

43 BL Add MS 63167 fol. 20, Gandy to Gell, 8 July 1817.

44 BL Add MS 63167 fol. 1v, Gandy to Gell, 15 April 1817.

45 See, for example, BL Add MS 63167 fols 9–10, 23, 25, Gandy to Gell, 8 January 1817 and 15 November 1817. Gell trained briefly at the Royal Academy before going up to Cambridge, but, as he himself was the first to admit, he could never claim great skill as a draughtsman.

46 BL Add MS 63617 fol. 57, Cockerell to Gell, 13 February 1817.

47 BL Add MS 63617 fol. 21v, Gandy to Gell, 8 July 1817.

48 Madden, Literary Life and Correspondence (above, n. 9), II, 14.

49 T.L. Donaldson, Pompeii, Illustrated with Picturesque Views Engraved by W.B. Cooke, from the Original Drawings of Lieut. Col. Cockburn, 2 vols (London, 1827).

50 Gell's publications on Greece were aimed explicitly at the traveller, and in the case of the itineraries, published in such a format as would easily fit in the pocket; the Itinerary of the Morea cost only 10s 6d and the Itinerary of Greece 14s.

51 Morning Chronicle, 25 March 1817, 2 col. 4. John Soane jun. was dismissive of Gell's ‘paltry publication’, presumably because it did not meet his expectations of architectural detail and analysis. A.T. Bolton (ed.), The Portrait of Sir John Soane RA (1753–1837) Set Forth in Letters to his Friends (London, 1927), 286.

52 Eclectic Review 14 (September 1820), 147. Prices for the quarto edition, which also boasted proof plates, were not advertised: Morning Chronicle, 25 March 1817, 2 col. 4.

53 The cost of the first of four parts of Donaldson's Pompeii Illustrated with Picturesque Views (above, n. 49), including sixteen plates and seven outlines, was £4 4s or £6 6s for proof impressions and £8 8s on India paper. The first part of George Townley's Views of Pompeii with a Descriptive Account was advertised at 12s 6d. See Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 2 (1818), 705Google Scholar.

54 Donaldson's, Pompeii Illustrated with Picturesque Views (above, n. 49) was completed by 1827; Mazois's study of Pompeii stretched from 1812 to 1838, and no more than three of the promised twelve parts of Townley's Views of Pompeii appear to have been published: see Catalogue of the Curious and Valuable Library of Lieutenant General Dowdeswell (London, 1828), 33.

55 He inherited £4,000 from his father (DRO D258/45/39/14, discharge of trustees by William Gell for £4,000 paid under his father's will's trust); the Brecknockshire property of his uncle Admiral John Gell (d. 1806) The National Archives [hereafter TNA] PROB 11/1456/3; and received the pension of £200 per annum from Princess Caroline until her death in 1821.

56 BL Add MS 63617 fol. 10, Gandy to Gell, 8 January 1817; DRO D3287/3/1, in a letter to John Murray dated 3 November 1828 he put the sum at £1,000 each for himself and Gandy and £2,000 for the publisher, that is a total profit of £4,000 clear of expenses. As he was trying to persuade Murray to take on the publication of the second series, he may have been somewhat generous in rounding up the final figures.

57 Eclectic Review 14 (September 1820), 144–58Google Scholar.

58 The text and illustrations of the 1821 and 1824 editions of Pompeiana were almost identical to the original 1817–19 edition, but a few additions were made to the text (including a key to the vignettes) and a revised map of the site as excavated in 1821 was provided. In the original version, as a result of the rather haphazard way in which Gell sent copy to Gandy, material on the House of Actaeon, for example, was located in two different sections. This was reordered for the 1821 edition.

59 Gandy signed the visitors’ book for Queen Caroline when she took up residence briefly in Rome on the Aventine Hill, following the death of George III: Fraser, Unruly Queen (above, n. 39), 344. John Soane jun. reported that he had met Gandy in Naples in 1819 in a letter to his father: Bolton (ed.), Portrait of Sir John Soane (above, n. 51), 286.

60 Gandy himself inherited the Deering estate from a friend in 1828, changing his name and his lifestyle to that of a landed gentleman and MP. On Gandy, see G.W. Burnet, ‘Deering [Gandy], John Peter (1787–1850)’, revised by A. Pimlott Baker, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online edition, May 2006 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7420 (last consulted 20.08.2014).

61 The preparatory notebooks are at the Getty 2002 M 16; the manuscript of the actual text at DRO D3287/3/1. The drawings for the third edition are at Sir John Soane's Museum.

62 Pompeiana (1832), I, 86–7, 112, 121, 132, 140.

63 On the friendship between Young and Gell, see Thompson, Sir Gardner Wilkinson and his Circle (above, n. 9). Young died in 1830, which caused Gell some problems in the remote supervision of the publication: see DRO D3287/3/1.

64 BL Add MS 63618 fol. 13, Young to Gell, 30 January 1829.

65 BL Add MS 63618 fol. 19, Robert Jennings to Gell, 6 August 1829.

66 DRO D258/50/134, Gell to Philip Gell, 15 April 1830.

67 DRO D3287/3/1, correspondence relating to Pompeiana (1832): ‘Notes for the engraver’ and ‘Notes for the Editor’.

68 J.C. Corson (ed.), Reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott's Residence in Italy, 1832 (London, 1957); on Bulwer Lytton, see above, n. 2.

69 Madden (ed.), Literary Life and Correspondence (above, n. 9), II, 85, Gell to Countess of Blessington, 10 March 1834.

70 Pompeiana (1817–19), xvi. See, for example, Salmon, Building on Ruins (above, n. 42), 78.

71 BL Add MS 63617 fol. 10, Gandy to Gell, 8 January 1817; fol. 21, Gandy to Gell, 17 October 1817; fol. 23, 15 November 1817, Gandy warned Gell that he knew of two other volumes on Pompeii that were in preparation that it was important to pre-empt.

72 The comparison of the image of an eagle seizing a hare on the fountain at the Triviis outside the House of Pansa to the acroteria of the temple of Nemesis at Rhamnus, which depicted a griffon pouncing on a hart, may well have originated with Gandy, as the temple was one of the sites that he studied in some detail on the Dilettanti mission, Pompeiana (1817–19), 168. The observation that ‘to this day’ roadside fountains are to be found in Turkey ‘for the convenience and refreshment of the traveller’ is almost certainly from Gell, who was always alert for signs of the persistence of customs from antiquity in the culture of modern Turkey. Pompeiana (1817–19), 160.

73 See, for example, Pompeiana (1817–19), 106. For Gell's views on city walls see Le mure di Roma disegnate da Sir W. Gell, illustrate con testo note da A. Nibby (Rome, 1820) and his Probestücke von Städtemauern des Alten Griechenlands … aus dem Englischen Übersetzt (Tübingen, 1831). This drew on and amplified comments made in earlier publications relating to his Greek tours, as well as his (then) unpublished work on walls around Latium.

74 Clay (ed.), Sir William Gell in Italy (above, n. 7), 64.

75 BL Add MS 63617 fol. 23, Gandy to Gell, 15 November 1817.

76 BL Add MS 63617 fol. 23v, Gandy to Gell, 15 November 1817.

77 Pompeiana (1817–19), xvi.

78 Romanelli's guidebook Viaggio a Pompei a Pesto (above, n. 23) had included one map of the city of Pompeii.

79 For example, extracts from Starke, Letters from Italy (above, n. 17) were published in the Belle Assemblée (November 1820), 223–4; extracts from Chetwode Eustace, Classical Tour (above, n. 14) were published in the Weekly Entertainer, 10 June 1816, 464–6; and from T. Watkins, Travels through Switzerland, Italy, Sicily, the Greek Islands to Constantinople, Greece, Ragusa, and the Dalmatian Isles, 2 vols (second edition, London, 1794) in the Weekly Entertainer, 15 November 1813, 197–8.

80 Pompeiana (1817–19), xxiii ‘Advertisement’.

81 BL Add MS 63617 fol. 16, Gandy to Gell, 15 May 1816.

82 Pompeiana (1817–19), 164.

83 BL Add MS 63617 fol. 1v, Gandy to Gell, 15 April 1817.

84 Pompeiana (1817–19), 189–90 and plate 37.

85 Eclectic Review 14 (September 1820), 147: ‘We mean, any appearances particularly striking as indicating the last situation or employments of the inhabitants, at the time the city was overwhelmed; such as, the positions of the skeletons sometimes found, unfinished processes of any kind of employment, situations of furniture and utensils, as shewing what had been their most recent use, circumstances attending the attempted escape of persons who had failed in that attempt, — any thing, in short the most adapted to place the imagination the directest manner in the living scene, just before it was suddenly covered with the black veil’.

86 On reactions to and interpretations of the various finds of human bodies, see Dwyer, Pompeii's Living Statues (above, n. 5), especially pp. 1–24 with regard to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

87 NLS MS 1542 fols 27–8, journal of Sir William Forbes, March 1793.

88 E. Bulwer Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii (London, 1906), 390.

89 Bulwer Lytton, Last Days of Pompeii (above, n. 88), 392.

90 Last Days of Pompeii and Pompeiana (1817–19), 96, 248; P. Beckford, Letters and Observations Written in a Short Tour through France and Italy by a Gentleman (Salisbury, 1786), 89–90.

91 Pompeiana (1817–19), 94: ‘within this recess was formed a human skeleton, of which the hand still grasped a lance. Conjecture has imagined this the remains of a sentinel, who preferred dying at his post or quitting it for the more ignominious death which, in conformity with the severe discipline of his country, would have awaited him’. See L. Behlman, ‘The sentinel of Pompeii: an exemplum for the nineteenth century’, in Gardner Coates and Syedl (eds), Antiquity Recovered (above, n. 4), 157–70, and Dwyer, Pompeii's Living Statues (above, n. 5), 12–13.

92 Hamilton, ‘Account of the discoveries’ (above, n. 15), suggested that the small number of bodies discovered was due to the fact that there had been sufficient warning of the imminent danger for most of the inhabitants to flee the city in advance of the devastation. A narrative of sudden and total destruction was more compelling, however.

93 Starke, Letters from Italy (above, n. 17), II, 109.

94 Dwyer, Pompeii's Living Statues (above, n. 5), 22; Cooley, Pompeii (above, n. 13), 36–49; Lazer, Resurrecting Pompeii (above, n. 1), 66–95.

95 Pompeiana (1817–19), xix: Gell noted that it was surprising that so few skeletons (c. 160 in total) had been discovered, but pointed out that as only around an eighth of the city had been uncovered, that meant that there may have been a total of around 1,300 killed in the eruption. Given that the circuit of the city was only two miles in extent, and that much of the interior was occupied by public buildings, he suggested that this represented a significant proportion of the total population. In his updates on the excavations to the Society of Dilettanti, Gell also reported additional finds of skeletons that could be ‘added to the list’; see Clay (ed.), Sir William Gell in Italy (above, n. 7), 41.

96 The Temple of Isis, the ‘maison du campagne’, the Greek temple and the Soldiers’ barracks.

97 Moore, View of Society and Manners in Italy (above, n. 19), II, 178–9. Francois de Chateaubriand famously made a similar suggestion fifteen years later in 1804: F.R. de Chateaubriand, Travels in America and Italy, 2 vols (London, 1828), II, 253–4, quoted in P. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present. Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge (MA), 2004), 100.

98 Chetwode Eustace, Classical Tour (above, n. 14), III, 67; Gell also repeated the suggestion that objects be left in situ and regretted the Neapolitans’ insistence upon removing everything of interest to the museum at Portici, Pompeiana (1817–19), 14.

99 Pompeiana (1817–19), 146. This was something of an overstatement on Gell's part; other accounts, for example, R. Castell's Villas of the Ancients Illustrated (London, 1728), had drawn on sources such as Pliny the Younger.

100 Pompeiana (1817–19), 140–2.

101 Pompeiana (1832), II, 18, with reference to the House of the Dioscuri, ‘the passage EE afforded a private entrance to the third or most distant house, without passing through any part of the central division, which had no immediate communication with the street, and was consequently the inner apartment’.

102 Clay (ed.), Sir William Gell in Italy (above, n. 7), 39.

103 Gell, The Topography of Troy, and its Vicinity (above, n. 34), 9.

104 Pompeiana (1817–19), 142.

105 Pompeiana (1832), I, 152–3.

106 Pompeiana (1832), I, 160; II, 99 and plate 37. See also Getty notebook 2002 M 16 leaf 39r.

107 Pompeiana (1817–19), 164.

108 Pompeiana (1832), I, 58.

109 BL Add MS 63617 fol. 14, Gandy to Gell, 15 February 1817.

110 BL Add MS 63617 fol. 16, Gandy to Gell, 15 May 1817.

111 Pompeiana (1817–19), 173. See also Pompeiana (1832), I, 170. Subsequent representations displayed greater prudery: Mary Beard, in Pompeii: the Life of a Roman Town (London, 2008), 88, has taken Bulwer Lytton to task for idealizing the House of the Tragic Poet as a ‘luxurious bachelor pad’ and failing to note the proximity of kitchen and lavatory in Pompeian houses; and the lavatory was omitted from the Pompeii Court at Crystal Palace in 1854.

112 Eclectic Review 14 (September 1820), 156Google Scholar.

113 In the 1821 publication, explanatory text for the vignettes was provided in an appendix, where the reader was informed that ‘This representation of a Pompeian convenience is described on page 174’, Pompeiana (1821), 270.

114 J. Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts and Letters, during an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803, second edition (London, 1816), 174; R. Phillips, Geography Illustrated on a Popular Plan (London, 1820), 209.

115 Forsyth, unusually, mentioned being shown the ‘water closet’ by the guide at the suburban villa, Remarks on Antiquities (above, n. 114), 306.

116 Clay (ed.), Sir William Gell in Italy (above, n. 7), 46, 67, 71.

117 Norfolk Record Office MS 20677, 148, journal of Robert Harvey, 1773; Miller, Letters from Italy (above, n. 11), II, 280–1; NLS MS 6327 fol. 57v, journal of Sir James Hall.

118 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, translated by M.H. Morgan (New York, 1960), 211–13; journal of Sir William Forbes, NLS MS 1542 fol. 24.

119 Pompeiana (1817–19), 158; compare with Donaldson, Pompeii Illustrated with Picturesque Views (above, n. 49), 4, where Vitruvius's critique was wholly endorsed: Pompeii's decorations ‘particularly in the ornamental part, partake of the bad taste that was introduced into Rome after the time of Augustus, and is, with so much justice, censured by Vitruvius’. However, Gell was not the only architect/antiquary to question Vitruvian orthodoxy in this period: see Winsor Liscombe, William Wilkins (above, n. 30), 77–8.

120 Pompeiana (1817–19), 160 footnote.

121 Pompeiana (1817–19), 155. Forsyth made a similar point with regard to the paintings in Portici a few years earlier in Remarks on Antiquities (above, n. 114), 288: ‘yet against these unfortunate pictures critics bring all the rules of the art, they subject them to a second ordeal; they examine colours which had been flying off like brick-dust as sharply as they examine the best preserved Titian; they compare these shadows of a shade with statues found in the same town, compare panels painted by provincial artists, with bronzes which may have been cast at Rome or Athens, and thus rank the ancients as much below us in painting, as they excelled us in sculpture’. Gell and Gandy were certainly familiar with and referred to the travelogues by Starke (whom Gell knew personally) and Chetwode Eustace, but never referred to Forsyth's volume. Forsyth also shared Gell's preoccupation with tracing the influence of the original Greek colony on Roman Pompeii.

122 Pompeiana (1832), II, 118.

123 Clay (ed.), Sir William Gell in Italy (above, n. 7), 40.

124 Pompeiana (1832), I, 171. Gell's positive evaluation followed that of the German artist Wilhelm Ternite, who had first alerted Gell to their discovery: Madden (ed.), Literary Life and Correspondence (above, n. 9), II, 81.

125 Pompeiana (1817–19), 177–8.

126 A. Mau, Pompeii: its Life and Art (London, 1982).

127 Pompeiana (1832), II, 106.

128 On Davy's work, see Jones, S. Rees, ‘Early experiments in pigment analysis’, Studies in Conservation 35 (2) (1990), 93101 Google Scholar.

129 Pompeiana (1817–19), 154.

130 Madden (ed.), Literary Life and Correspondence (above, n. 9), II, 56. Not all his visitors appreciated his taste, however: James Ramsay, in his sharply two-edged memoir of Gell, deprecated his want of taste and his fondness for overly bright colours and ‘meretricious ornament’: Ramsay, ‘A sketch of the character of Sir William Gell’ (above, n. 9), II, 18.

131 Pompeiana (1817–19), 158.

132 Pompeiana (1832), I, 106, 155.

133 Pompeiana (1832), II, 106.

134 Pompeiana (1817–19), 224.

135 Pompeiana (1817–19), 196.

136 Pompeiana (1817–19), 200.

137 Pompeiana (1832), I, 70–1, 80.

138 Pompeiana (1832), I, 136; II, 95, 143.

139 Pompeiana (1832), I, 84.

140 Pompeiana (1832), I, 136.

141 Again, Bulwer Lytton evidently learned much from his discussions with Gell, particularly in the emphasis upon the difference between the gargantuan Roman bath complexes and the comparative simplicity of those found in Pompeii.

142 See, for example, Pompeiana (1832), I, 121.

143 Pompeiana (1832), II, 86.

144 DRO D258/50/47, Gell to Philip Gell, 22 October 1810. On the Society of Dilettanti, see J. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti (New Haven (CT), 2009), esp. pp. 61–89, and B. Redford, Dilettanti: the Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-century England (Los Angeles, 2008), 113–28.

145 See Pompeiana (1817–19), 133, in allusion to the sign of the phallus over the fornix.

146 DRO D258/50/84, Gell to Philip Gell, 14 July 1815. In the published version, Gell referred simply to the ‘baker's sign’: Pompeiana (1817–19), 190.

147 Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV (above, n. 35), I, 60.

148 Pompeiana (1832), II, 11; see also the reference to an ‘obscene picture’ and the triple phallus in Pompeiana (1832), I, 11.

149 W. Clarke, Pompeii, 2 vols, second edition (London, 1833), I, 5.

150 Clarke, Pompeii (above, n. 149), II, 106.

151 Clarke, Pompeii (above, n .148), II, 82. See also the article ‘Pompeii’ reviewing Clarke's volume in the Penny Magazine that focused chiefly on the technology of the bread oven and other domestic matters, which were assumed to be ‘most interesting for our readers’, 24 November 1832, 338–40.

152 Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present (above, n. 97), 161–200.

153 George Scharf's handbook The Pompeian Court in the Crystal Palace (London, 1854), 33–7, drew heavily on Bulwer Lytton, Last Days of Pompeii, but also acknowledged Bulwer Lytton's debt to Gell in describing the configuration of Roman houses. See also Hales, S.J., ‘Re-casting antiquity: Pompeii and the Crystal Palace’, Arion, third series 14 (1) (2006), 99134 Google Scholar. Hales arguably has underplayed the extent to which Bulwer Lytton's evocation drew on information and insights provided by Gell.

154 Athenaeum, 21 January 1854, 92. Hales also has suggested that by mid-century Pompeii was increasingly represented as a Greek city colonized by the Romans, which would have strengthened the direct comparison between it and Romano-British settlements: Hales, ‘Re-casting antiquity’ (above, n. 153), 112.

155 See, for example, A.J. Kempe, ‘Londiniana IV’, Gentleman's Magazine (April, 1836), 370; Smith, C.R., ‘Observations on the Roman remains found in various parts of London, in the years 1834, 1835, 1836’, Archaeologia 27 (1838), 140–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 149–50; C.R. Smith, Collectanea Antiqua. Etchings and Notices of Ancient Remains, Illustrative of the Habits, Customs, and History of Past Ages, 7 vols (London, 1848–80), II, 10–11; C.R. Smith, Illustrations of Roman London (London, 1859), 120, 147; G.P. Bevan, ‘The English Pompeii’, Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country (October 1860), 539–42; T. Wright, Guide to the Ruins of the Roman City of Uriconium (Shrewsbury, 1859).

156 Blix, From Paris to Pompeii (above, n. 10), 1–47.

157 For recent and positive evaluations of Gell's topographical accuracy, see Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Roman topography and the prism of Sir William Gell’ (above, n. 8), and C. Plouviez, ‘Straddling the Aegean: William Gell 1811–13’, in S. Searight and M. Wagstaff (eds), Travellers in the Levant: Voyagers and Visionaries (Durham, 2001), 42–56.

158 DRO D258/50/151, Gell to Philip Gell, 22 August 1832, where he observed that he would rather ‘live under the Turks than Mr Atwood and Co’.

159 DRO D258/50/154, Gell to Philip Gell, 6 February 1834: ‘the deuce take your penny magazines, they have ruined the Booksellers who can no longer buy ones books and thus all my means for patching up my pecuniary misfortunes have failed’.

160 Ramsay described him as ‘possessing general, though superficial information, both literary and scientific’ (‘A sketch of the character of Sir William Gell’ (above, n. 9), II, 15). See also Wroth in Dictionary of National Biography (above, n. 9); T.H. Dyer, Pompeii: its History, Buildings and Antiquities (London, 1867), 6; and Dwyer's criticisms in Pompeii's Living Statues (above, n. 5).