A little over three hundred years ago, the duc d'Elbeuf began digging in the grounds of his Neapolitan villa and brought to light the ‘Herculanean Vestals’, classical statues which helped fire the eighteenth-century European craze for the antique. In 2013, the British Museum's Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum attracted some 300,000 visitors, making it one of the Museum's most successful ticketed exhibitions. The 25 papers collected in this timely volume probe the reasons for the Vesuvian cities’ continued fascination among broad publics. Its international contributors represent diverse disciplinary perspectives and cover an eclectic and engaging range of episodes in Pompeii's reception from the eighteenth century to the present.

This is not the first edited collection in recent years to deal with Pompeii's reception, and comparisons with V.C. Gardner Coates and J.L. Seydl's Antiquity Recovered: the Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum (2009) are inevitable. Although there is some overlap in terms of contributors (both Coates and Seydl have papers in this volume), Pompeii and the Public Imagination is notably broader in scope. Its essays, which cover artistic, literary and cinematic receptions, tourism and museology (Seydl, Levin-Richardson, Fisher and Langlands, Betzer), Freudian psychoanalysis (Orrells), and the persistent morbid associations of Pompeii with both real-world disasters (P.) and other-worldly practices such as spiritualism and mesmerism (H.), provide an engaging partner to the earlier volume's focus on antiquarianism, archaeology and the history of art. The two collections are indeed complementary, as the first century of Pompeii's rediscovery receives fairly scant coverage in the current volume compared with the lavish treatment of pre-1800 topics in Antiquity Recovered. There are sound reasons for this, however, for H. and P. aim ‘to move beyond the usual emphasis on Pompeii as a source of artistic and aesthetic influence, and to demonstrate something of the huge variety of ways in which Pompeii appeals to different audiences’ (p. vii).Footnote ¹ As several contributors observe, it was only in the nineteenth century that the site of Pompeii was opened up to broad publics, paving the way for the mass tourism which is seen today and which is interrogated in various ways by Levin-Richardson, Fisher and Langlands and (albeit retaining a strong historical focus) Wallace-Hadrill. The papers on eighteenth-century topics (Fitzon on Goethe, Baum on William Beckford, Coates on Angelica Kauffmann and Witucki on Mme de Staël) tend to maintain a single-author or artist focus and to remain within the orbit of the high-cultural, aristocratic and haut bourgeois groups who formed both the main visitors to the sites and the prime consumers of neoclassical taste, in the earlier period.

It is therefore unsurprising that most papers discuss Pompeii's reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They bear witness to the range and reach of the inspiration Pompeii provided, but continuities are also revealed. Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 novel Last Days of Pompeii looms remarkably large, providing inspiration to artists, novelists, museum curators and popular entertainers in its own century and today (see especially Harrison, Bridges, Malamud, Seydl and the interview with Robert Harris). Another emergent theme is the importance of new visual technologies such as photography, the panorama and stereoscope for bringing a sense of the disaster and of the buried cities to broad audiences in both Europe and the United States (Betzer, Hales, Seydl).

In reading the papers, one gains a strong sense of the importance of Pompeii's catastrophe narrative to its continued fascination, although a pair of papers (Fisher and Langlands, Levin-Richardson) focused upon the brothel and the so-called ‘Secret Cabinet’ also testify to contemporary interest in and imagination of the seamier side of Pompeian life. The enduring contrast between ‘life’ and ‘death’ in imaginings of the buried Vesuvian cities is, indeed, one of the most interesting tensions explored by this volume. Several papers touch upon political imaginings of Pompeian life: thus Figurelli explores the politics of representations of slaves in Pompeian settings in nineteenth-century Italian painting, Spiegel builds an interesting case for Proust's use of Pompeii to adumbrate the destruction of old social orders in First-World War Paris, Malamud addresses the political and social context behind the popularity of Last Days of Pompeii in antebellum United States, and P. discusses some of the ways in which Pompeii furnished a reference-point within contemporary and subsequent responses to the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust. This list of examples shows, however, that it is Pompeii's destruction at least as much as her status as a record of Roman life that have secured her interest – a tendency which, as Hartnett argues in a fascinating paper on Spinazzola's excavation photographs, has also affected scholarly and archaeological presentations of the city.

It is hard to do justice to the diversity and interest of the range of papers within the space of a short review. Certainly one can imagine this volume offering inspiration to university teachers seeking to devise courses on Pompeii and its reception, as well as to undergraduate and graduate students researching dissertations. What can a volume like this tell us about the present state and methods of classical reception studies? One final contrast seems worth commenting upon: that between those papers that focus on the study of particular ‘engagements’ with Pompeian material and those that attempt to sketch a broader terrain of cultural reception. This divide is best exemplified by two papers on Bulwer-Lytton's novel, by S. Harrison and M.D. Bridges. While Harrison is struck by Bulwer-Lytton's archaeological exactitude and the manner in which Last Days’ allusions to Petronius and Apuleius construct a classical pedigree for the nineteenth-century novel, Bridges seeks to locate it within a broader spectrum of nineteenth-century literary and visual receptions, animated by discourses of affect, sentimentality and what she terms ‘necromantic pathos’, and connecting it to popular entertainments such as the panorama (see too H.) as well as the learned and elite audiences highlighted in Harrison's study. The results are two strikingly different interpretations of the same, highly influential work, and perhaps illustrate two different approaches to the study of classical receptions.