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A review by eddie
Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock
3.0
There he goes - Thomas Love Peacock swims on into literary history in the slipstream of his very much more famous contemporary friends the English Romantic poets. Nightmare Abbey’s primary interest is because it satirises, in a manner of speaking, the personalities and philosophical concerns of the Shelleys (Percy & Mary), Byron, and Coleridge (with glancing blows at Mary’s parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft) - written in the form of a satire, of sorts, of the Gothic Novel.
By coincidence, Nightmare Abbey was published in the same year (1818) as that more radical satire of the genre, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, as well as the genre-busting Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
It’s not recorded if Peacock read either of those books. It’s clear at any rate from Nightmare Abbey he is no feminist.
Peacock borrows the mise-en-scène of the Gothic novel as a backdrop for his characters’ philosophical debates. A group of writers and philosophers gather at a crumbling, isolated rural mansion on the coast of Lincolnshire between the fens and the sea. Scythrop (Percy Shelley) languishes in his semi-ruined tower, torn between two loves (the real-life Harriet and Mary Shelley), reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, and making vague plans to improve the world through revolution. The tower is cloaked in ivy and inhabited by owls. The castle’s servants are all given amusingly Gothic-appropriate names (Raven; Crow, Skellet, Deathshead). A ‘ghost’ intermittently terrorises the servants and guests; two Proto-naturalists enthusiastically search for a mermaid reported in the locality.
Peacock’s charming and imaginatively detailed narrative never disturbs the equanimity of his characters. They politely pursue their discussions in spite of the plot mechanics - this disconnect reminded me of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and PG Wodehouse’s novels. Peacock probably derives this technique from the method of Voltaire’s Candide and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas - Nightmare Abbey is concerned to uphold the certainties of the 18th-century Enlightenment against the formal and emotional innovations of the Romantics. His sentences sparkle with gentle wit.
Coleridge probably gets the worst of the satire. He’s depicted as an over-educated jargon-drenched boffin unable to engage with reality. There’s an amusing conversation between his character and an uncomprehending Marionetta (Harriet, the beautiful village dunce. Mary by contrast is an intelligent virago). Shelley (Scythrop) can do no major wrong for Peacock and is satirised in an indulgent and starry-eyed way. Byron makes a guest appearance for one chapter only and speaks exclusively in lines cribbed from Childe Harold (the text Peacock objected to the most and possibly the impetus for his novel). However, the satire seems carefully defanged; Peacock avoids major offence. Shelley adored Nightmare Abbey and Byron sent Peacock a rosebud on reading it. Mary Shelley hasn’t left her responses to us, but she and Peacock mutually disliked each other.
I wish Peacock had written a journal or a memoir. Apart from his Romantic connections, he worked all his life as an important official in the East India Company, retiring just a year before the Indian Mutiny. Later in life he supported and mentored the Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith, who was a close friend and partner of Peacock’s son and married Peacock’s widowed daughter. The marriage famously was not a success and his wife’s elopement with the painter Henry Wallis and the subsequent divorce inspired novels and poems by Meredith.
The elderly Peacock was so attached to his books he refused to leave his library in a house fire. Although rescued, he never recovered and died shortly afterwards.
By coincidence, Nightmare Abbey was published in the same year (1818) as that more radical satire of the genre, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, as well as the genre-busting Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
It’s not recorded if Peacock read either of those books. It’s clear at any rate from Nightmare Abbey he is no feminist.
Peacock borrows the mise-en-scène of the Gothic novel as a backdrop for his characters’ philosophical debates. A group of writers and philosophers gather at a crumbling, isolated rural mansion on the coast of Lincolnshire between the fens and the sea. Scythrop (Percy Shelley) languishes in his semi-ruined tower, torn between two loves (the real-life Harriet and Mary Shelley), reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, and making vague plans to improve the world through revolution. The tower is cloaked in ivy and inhabited by owls. The castle’s servants are all given amusingly Gothic-appropriate names (Raven; Crow, Skellet, Deathshead). A ‘ghost’ intermittently terrorises the servants and guests; two Proto-naturalists enthusiastically search for a mermaid reported in the locality.
Peacock’s charming and imaginatively detailed narrative never disturbs the equanimity of his characters. They politely pursue their discussions in spite of the plot mechanics - this disconnect reminded me of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and PG Wodehouse’s novels. Peacock probably derives this technique from the method of Voltaire’s Candide and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas - Nightmare Abbey is concerned to uphold the certainties of the 18th-century Enlightenment against the formal and emotional innovations of the Romantics. His sentences sparkle with gentle wit.
Coleridge probably gets the worst of the satire. He’s depicted as an over-educated jargon-drenched boffin unable to engage with reality. There’s an amusing conversation between his character and an uncomprehending Marionetta (Harriet, the beautiful village dunce. Mary by contrast is an intelligent virago). Shelley (Scythrop) can do no major wrong for Peacock and is satirised in an indulgent and starry-eyed way. Byron makes a guest appearance for one chapter only and speaks exclusively in lines cribbed from Childe Harold (the text Peacock objected to the most and possibly the impetus for his novel). However, the satire seems carefully defanged; Peacock avoids major offence. Shelley adored Nightmare Abbey and Byron sent Peacock a rosebud on reading it. Mary Shelley hasn’t left her responses to us, but she and Peacock mutually disliked each other.
I wish Peacock had written a journal or a memoir. Apart from his Romantic connections, he worked all his life as an important official in the East India Company, retiring just a year before the Indian Mutiny. Later in life he supported and mentored the Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith, who was a close friend and partner of Peacock’s son and married Peacock’s widowed daughter. The marriage famously was not a success and his wife’s elopement with the painter Henry Wallis and the subsequent divorce inspired novels and poems by Meredith.
The elderly Peacock was so attached to his books he refused to leave his library in a house fire. Although rescued, he never recovered and died shortly afterwards.