Nightmare Abbey & Crotchet Castle
1830
First Published
3.54
Average Rating
256
Number of Pages
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 gay 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 the 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.
Avg Rating
3.54
Number of Ratings
184
5 STARS
18%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
28%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
4%
goodreads
Author
Thomas Love Peacock
Author · 11 books
Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) was an English novelist and poet. For most of his life, Peacock worked for the East India Co. He was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who greatly inspired his writing. His best verse is interspersed in his novels, which are dominated by the conversations of their characters and satirize the intellectual currents of the day. His best-known work, Nightmare Abbey (1818), satirizes romantic melancholy and includes characters based on Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron.
