Written English fiction in the nineteenth century, and earlier, was wordy. Compared to modern writing, settings, characters and action were all vastly over-described, overly metaphoric and served largely as demonstrations of the bloated vocabularies of those of a class possessed of a heavy education, a passion for deploying it and abundant idleness.

Nevertheless, there was nothing wrong with the imagination of the authors of the time and if you could strip through the verbiage or, better, develop a taste for it, you’d generally find a pretty good tale.

Not so with Nightmare Abbey. This novella consists in the main of various groupings of characters, all of the class referred to above, sitting around discussing, in the fashion first described, the philosophies in vogue amongst the intelligentsia of the time and the literature issuing forth from them.

There is nothing one would call a plot. There is no tale to speak of. The strength of the book is, I am told, Peacock’s fine sense of wit and satire. This is the core of the book. Peacock was making fun of the overwrought philosophical leanings and literature of his time. Unfortunately, to a modern reader, someone not of the time and class in which the work was composed, this is only barely discernible because you have to have firm grounding in these philosophies and literature, in order to “get” the satire. You cannot understand a parody if you have no knowledge of its target.

So the whole point of the book can only be appreciated by those modern readers possessed of this knowledge. That would not be me. My boredom is expressed by my rating. It wasn’t one star because I actually learned something. It wasn’t three stars because what I learned I didn’t find interesting.

Your mileage may be different.