Pompeii and Herculaneum: Life and death

British Museum, 28 March - 29 September 2013

Marble relief showing Bacchus and his followers, Pompeii.
From the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei

Insights into the daily life of a culture that remains the foundation of Western civilisation, but limited on the terrible paradox that this is one of the few slave societies that have existed.

Not so long ago, at least the popular image of ancient Rome was one of clean white marble, white togas, and fringe haircuts. We can thank the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum for giving us a more colourful, bawdy version of the period.

Pompeii had a population of around 15,000, or the same as the admittedly large village of Kidlington, outside Oxford. Herculaneum was about a third the size. Comparatively, Rome itself at the time of Vesuvius erupting may have had a population of a million or more, so a decent city even by our standards now.

So as an urban centre, we shouldn't expect too much of what we find in these 'towns'. It makes sense for the curators of this fascinating exhibition to focus on what the archaeological evidence tells us about daily urban life, rather than the artistic quality of the early Roman Empire.

That said, some of the art here is impressive. The marble reliefs in particular are classical in the best, old-fashioned sense. And the portraits, in either 2 or 3 dimensions, are wonderful. On the other hand, perhaps because frescoes can't be imported, and have to be made in situ, the examples here are understandably uninspiring.

It's still something of a magical exhibition, partly recreating a large town house in Pompeii within the beautiful neoclassicism of the old British Library reading room, parts of which can be seen above as spectators walk around.

Presumably the town house is just that - the residence for a wealthy family in town. Perhaps they would have owned large tracts of rural farmland, and may have spent much of their time in a larger rural villa.

Otherwise, the townhouse here would seem small for a decent sized family, especially given the large number of slaves that were required. With this rural hinterland in mind, the part-garden, part-house layout becomes explicable, not to mention the shopfront that had to be passed through in order to reach the central atrium.

The visit is enlivened by sexually explicit garden furniture, a statue of Hercules drunk, and ribald toilet graffiti. This might lead us to think the ancient Romans were less prudish than us, but as the curators point out, they rarely enjoyed privacy, with slaves always present.

This aspect - the omnipresence of slavery - is necessarily downplayed in this show. I can't easily see how to convey that sense, nor the horrifying implications of it in terms of demand for slaves.

So while the exhibition helps us take a further step away from the image of ancient Romans as dignified elder geniuses, it still doesn't embed us within the slave society. Any attempt to really show the daily life in the period must tackle this problem head-on, and for this reason we still get only a partial view here.

Dickens' house museum

27 December 2012

Mr Fezziwig's ball, an illustration from A Christmas Carol.
This image of conviviality is what we've inherited from Dickens' view of Christmas.
Yet it effectively exists only in Scrooge's imagined happy past life.
It's how Scrooge chose, and chooses to respond to this vision that matters.

The reopening of his house museum is an opportunity to evaluate Dickens’ highly idiosyncratic views on Christmas. 

Dickens didn’t invent the nineteenth century obsession with Christmas, but this year, his two hundredth birthday, it is worth reflecting on how much he popularised the event, and what it seems to have meant for him. 

While he decorated yuletide with all the trimmings, and these trimmings are what we continue to associate with this time of year, his central interest was very different, and not at all Christian, though he might have objected to this. 

He perceived Christmas as a time of ghosts, both in the form of subjects of scary stories and metaphorically as a time for remembering our past life and perhaps changing our future approach based on this consideration. The Christmas Carol accommodates both these aspects, and when haunted Scrooge returns to the wonderment and imagination of his youth, the power of this imagination rejuvenates him.  

For Dickens, then, Christmas was principally a time when the imagination could work on us, and although his Christmas stories have the conventional happy ending, as with Scrooge, there is always the possibility that its workings will have a negative effect, as when we think on deaths in the family. 

The Dickens house museum, located in one of his early London residences, reopened in December just in time to capture those wishing to celebrate both the man and his connection with Christmas. 

The house was closed in order to extend the amenities, and allow more people to experience the original house. Nonetheless over the holiday period the house was extremely crowded, which limits the enjoyment.

It also suffers from the curse of all new museums – the interactives don’t work, nor is the guidebook back from the printers yet. Oh well, those wrinkles will be sorted out. 

Otherwise, I had mixed feelings. Too much focuses on what is referred to as Dickens’ sympathy with the poor, unparalleled in his time. Perhaps Dickens felt sympathy with the poor, though it would be hard to tell from his writing about them, always external to their situation, always sentimentalising much as he did with everyone.  

Moralist critics of Dickens, starting with his mentor Thomas Carlyle, have always complained about his sentimentality. These critics may miss the point, but they are at least accurate, unlike his moralist supporters, who claim that he was a champion of the oppressed.

The upper floor of this house is dedicated to this vision of Dickens, wildly wrong as would be observed by anyone simply reading how he described his temporary confinement to a blacking factory as a child, the great trauma of his life.  

 

In these words, he shows no sympathy for his fellow workers, most of whom were there for much longer than he. Rather, he is concerned that nobody noticed he was destined for much better things, as indeed, he was.

He knew his genius; he followed it; and on the side, like anyone with scruples, he expressed concern for the plight of the poor, though it had nothing to do with his talent, nor was it something he focussed upon unduly.

Dickens combined a vivid imagination (natively amoral, but trained into a conventional strict morality) with a love of theatre, especially comedy, and of conviviality combined with hard work. It is this mixture that produces what is distinctively great about his writing, which has almost nothing in common with that of any writer of his time.

Some of his strengths are reflected in the exhibits here. A playbill from one of his private performances of a Wilkie Collins melodrama (and notable, a farce afterwards). A dining room where we’re told he somehow entertained 18 people, which must have been very cosy, and a feat worthy of his Pickwick.

 

What a pity that here, as elsewhere, what is most important about Dickens, what makes him live, is buried amongst a focus on poverty that, if we seek for it in his works, does neither the author nor his current readers any credit.