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.