Complete and unabridged, with 25 full-page plates by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John Martin and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Pompeii in the last week of August, AD 79: a Greek, an Egyptian priest of Isis, a blind flower-seller who alone knows the streets in the dark. Bulwer-Lytton wrote it after seeing Bryullov's enormous canvas in Milan, and the excavations gave him his set — the amphitheatre, the House of the Tragic Poet, the sentry at his post. It made Pompeii a Victorian obsession. Twenty-five plates of Roman ruins and street scenes, from Panini's capriccios to Linton's views of the Forum, fix the novel's vanished city in paint.