Full Description
This 1818 novel is set in a former abbey whose owner, Christopher Glowry, is host to visitors who enjoy his hospitality and engage in endless debate. Among these guests are figures recognizable to Peacock's contemporaries, including characters based on Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mr. Glowry's son Scythrop (also modeled on a famous Romantic, Peacock's friend Percy Bysshe Shelley) locks himself up in a tower where he reads German tragedies and transcendental philosophy and develops a "passion for reforming the world." Disappointed in love, a sorrowful Scythrop decides the only thing to do is to commit suicide, but circumstances persuade him to instead follow his father in a love of misanthropy and Madeira. In addition to satire and comic romance, Nightmare Abbey presents a biting critique of the texts we view as central to British romanticism.
This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a range of illuminating contemporary documents on the novel's reception and its German and British literary contexts. A selection of Peacock's critical and autobiographical writings is also included.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A Note on the Text
Thomas Love Peacock: A Brief Chronology
Nightmare Abbey
Appendix A: The Reception of Nightmare Abbey
The Monthly Review 90 (November 1819)
The Literary Gazette 99 (12 December 1818)
The Tickler 1.1 (1 December 1818)
The European Magazine, and London Review 75 (March1819)
From James Spedding, Edinburgh Review 68 (January1839)
The Examiner (28 May 1837)
Appendix B: German Literature
From Karl Grosse, "The Marquis of Grosse" (1796)
From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stella: A Play for Lovers (1774)
From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
From Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff (1813)
Appendix C: Literary Contexts
From William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)
From William Godwin, Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England (1817)
From Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual (1816)
From Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (1817)
From Percy Bysshe Shelley, Author's Preface to The Revolt of Islam (1818)
From George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Corsair, A Tale (1814)
From George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth (1818)
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Dedication to Don Juan (1833)
From William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825)
Appendix D: Peacock's Critical and Autobiographical Writings
From "An Essay on Fashionable Literature" (1818)
From "The Four Ages of Poetry" (1820)
From "French Comic Romances" (1835)
Preface to Volume 57 of Bentley's Standard Novels (1837)
"Recollections of Childhood: The Abbey House" (1837)
From "Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley" (1860)
Select Bibliography
