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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Nightmare Abbey; Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock Nightmare Abbey; Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Nightmare Abbey; Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock Nightmare Abbey; Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock. Welcome: The T. L. Peacock Society attempts to popularise the eximious virtues of Peacock's novels and other writings, as well as promoting the love of Classical learning which was a feature of his life and works. The society is planning a second international conference on Peacock to be held in Britain (or Australia) in 2010. ( all pages are best viewed on a computer ) Feel free to send your recommendations for improving this site; and please send details of any mistake which you may find herein. The picture of Peacock above is a miniature painted by R. Jean when Peacock was eighteen years of age. The TLP Society's web pages are designed and maintained by Informal in Hobart, Tasmania. "The world is a stage, and life is a farce, and he that laughs most has most profit of the performance." — Brother Michael in Maid Marian, Chap. XVI. © 1998–2003 The Thomas Love Peacock Society. All works by Peacock published within this site are in the public domain; permission to copy other parts of these pages for academic purposes is given provided that full acknowledgement of the source be supplied. The 100 best novels: No 9 – Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (1818) Nightmare Abbey , like Frankenstein (no 8 in this series), appeared in 1818. Strangely, it was also inspired by Shelley, who was friends with Peacock. His satire, however, was lighthearted and whimsical and a kind of in-joke. There's no way of knowing if Peacock had actually read Mary Shelley's novel, but Nightmare Abbey makes a nice counterpoint, and speaks of the importance of a new audience. The regency was a turning point for English fiction. It was not only that the prince regent was a man of culture who adored the works of Jane Austen, there was also a wholly new market for novels: middle-class readers with money, enthusiasm and taste. After a long gestation, literary life had arrived. More than 100 years after Daniel Defoe had sat in the stocks and John Bunyan had composed The Pilgrim's Progress in Bedford jail, English novelists were now fully established at the centre of cultural life. Once upon a time, writers had published anonymously or under assumed names, fearing disgrace, or worse. Now they were known, talked about and sometimes even well-paid. In the beginning, the review process had been patchy and vulnerable to actual violence. Now there were some influential magazines in play; literary criticism was recognisably the occupation we know today. Elsewhere on Grub Street, booksellers such as John Murray were becoming publishers. A rackety trade was acquiring respectability. Simultaneously, the inhabitants of the literary world, especially in London, were beginning an informal dialogue, through their books, which knitted the community into an ongoing conversation about literature. It's a process that survives to the present, a process we can follow through this catalogue of 100 novels. Jane Austen, for instance, would satirise Mrs Radcliffe's popular Mysteries of Udolpho in Northanger Abbey . The same engagement of artist and subject explains the career of this half- forgotten minor genius, Thomas Love Peacock. Peacock was born to a naval family in Weymouth in 1785, inherited a small annuity, began to write poetry and went walking in Scotland like a true romantic, a young man of his time. He was clever and rather idle. To his friends, he must have seemed like a dilettante; all his life he behaved as though there were other things to do besides writing. In 1812, however, he published a long and difficult poem, The Philosophy of Melancholy . As a result, he met Shelley, fell under the spell of the great poet, became his friend and began to find his own voice as a writer, turning to prose satire. Peacock's claim on posterity derives from the very brief period 1813 to 1818, when he became part of Shelley's haphazard retinue and even accepted a kind of pension in lieu of household duties. In 1814, he published an attack on the Lake poets, Sir Proteus: A Satirical Ballad. His first satirical novel, Headlong Hall , followed a year later. Peacock is an original and has had few imitators. His fiction – Nightmare Abbey is the best of four country-house satires, including Headlong Hall and Crotchet Castle – occupies a special place in this list and deserves to be remembered as the enjoyable and undemanding beginnings of a strand in the canon that possibly includes the Aldous Huxley of Antic Hay and the Stella Gibbons of Cold Comfort Farm . It's too soon to know if those titles will make it into my final 100, but there is a real connection. I also think that there's something of Peacock's whimsical inventiveness in Lewis Carroll, but that's only a guess. I have no idea if the stuttering maths don had read any of Peacock's fiction. Anyway, Peacock is not wholly unprecedented. His influences include Swift, Voltaire and Rabelais (who also influenced Sterne). Nightmare Abbey is amazingly allusive, with references to Shakespeare, Pope, Pliny and Goethe, among many others. Peacock's rather stagey, even theatrical effects find echoes in the later comic fiction of writers such as Jerome K Jerome, HH Munro ("Saki") and the young PG Wodehouse, among others. Wodehouse, indeed, appropriates Peacock's country-house milieu wholesale. It would be interesting to know how many contemporary writers of light fiction are familiar with Peacock. He certainly deserves to be better known, hence his place here: he's a personal favourite. The plot of Nightmare Abbey is cardboard-thin, and concerns the romantic ditherings of Scythrop Glowry between two love objects, Marionetta and Stella. This parodies the difficulties of Shelley's relations with Harriet Westbrook and Mary Godwin, but the real pleasure of the novel lies in Peacock's inimitable style, the exaggerated dialogue and the entertaining songs, and the delight he takes in poking fun at the romantic movement. Shelley himself was nothing but generous in his response. "I know not how to praise the lightness, chastity and strength of the language of the whole. It perhaps exceeds all your works in this." Shelley, who is Scythrop, had been in on the game from the beginning. Peacock wrote to him on 30 May 1818 to say that "I have almost finished Nightmare Abbey " and to complain that "the fourth canto of Childe Harold is really too bad". Peacock cared passionately about the condition of English literature and was, in his mild-mannered way, a fierce champion of high standards. In another letter to Shelley, he says he wants "to let in a little daylight" on the "atrabilious complexion" of contemporary literature, a typical Peacock formulation. His concern, throughout, is for the wellbeing of the English literary tradition. The end of civilisation as we know it is another familiar starting point for lighthearted satire, from Anything Goes to Chrome Yellow . A Note on the Text: There was just one text of Nightmare Abbey , published by T Hookham Jr and Baldwin, Craddock & Joy of Paternoster Row in November 1818. With a few light revisions, it was republished in Bentley's Standard Novels , volume LVII in 1837. So Peacock became a set text for the Victorians and was later rediscovered by Edwardian and post-Edwardian critics. Other Peacock Titles: Headlong Hall (1816); Melincourt (1817); Crotchet Castle (1831); Gryll Grange (1860-61). ISBN 13: 9780140430455. Nightmare Abbey & Crotchet Castle (Penguin English Library El 45) Peacock, Thomas Love. This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. Thomas Love Peacock is literature’s perfect individualist. He has points in common with Aristophanes, Plato, Rabelais, Voltaire, and even Aldous Huxley, but resembles none of them; we can talk of the satirical novel of ideas, but his satire is too cheery and good-natured, his novel too rambling, and his ideas too jovially destructive for the label to stick. A romantic in his youth and a friend of Shelley, he happily made hay of the romantic movement in Nightmare Abbey , clamping Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley himself in a kind of painless pillory. And in Crotchet Castle he did no less for the political economists, pitting his gifts of exaggeration and ridicule against scientific progress and March of Mind. Yet the romantic in him never died: the long, witty, and indecisive talk of his characters is set in wild, natural scenery which Peacock describes with true feeling. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) was born in Weymouth, the son of a London merchant. His schooling ended before he was thirteen and he became a clerk in a City office in London while beginning a close study of French, Italian and English literature. He also published several volumes of minor poetry through which he made the acquaintance of Shelley, who was a close friend from 1812 until his death in 1822. Peacock wrote his first novel, Headlong Hall , in 1815, starting the series of seven satirical novels on which his fame rests. Melincourt and Nightmare Abbey , a satire on ‘black romanticism’, followed in 1817 and 1818. In 1820 he married Jane Gryffydh and also wrote The Four Ages of Poetry , which baited Shelley to reply with his classic Defense of Poetry . Further novels, Maid Marion (1822), The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), Crochet Castle (1831), a satire on political economy and the ideas of James Mill and Bentham, followed, but he was desperately grief- stricken by the death of his mother in 1833 and for the next twenty-five years wrote almost nothing, working with great diligence for the East India Company as an excellent administrator.
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