ABSTRACT
Pliny’s reference to Virgil highlights that accounts of natural and man-made disasters have similar goals and effects. French traveller and agent Ange Goudar claimed that his account of the Lisbon Earthquake strictly dealt with the event itself, while denouncing other, ‘picturesque’ accounts, relying on imagination. However, while accounts of disasters were written with the primary goal of providing a description for posterity, they could also provide a form of morbid entertainment for those readers ‘curious to listen to the story’d woe’. Post-disaster accounts provide precious insights into the way in which general and specific changes in a city are perceived: seeing whether the loss, survival or replacement of a particular feature is lamented or, indeed, lauded. In post-disaster accounts of the Fire of London and the Lisbon Earthquake, the dimension of the cities’ rebirth clearly dominates, taking precedence even over the themes of horror of the event and of the desolation in the aftermath.
