Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (top 10 best books of all time txt) 📕
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Published in 1818, Peacock’s novella Nightmare Abbey is a gentle satire of the then-popular gothic movement in literature. He pokes fun at the genre’s obsessions and most of the book’s characters are caricatures of well-known personages of the time.
Young Scythrop is the only son of Mr. Glowry, living in the semi-ruined Nightmare Abbey on his estate in Lincolnshire. Mr. Glowry, the survivor of a miserable marriage, is addicted to the depressing and the morbid, surrounding himself with servants whose names, such as Raven, Graves and Skellet, reflect his obsessions. His friends, also, are chosen from those who best reflect his misanthropic views.
Scythrop himself imagines himself a philosopher with a unique view of the world, and to this end has written a treatise titled “Philosophical Gas; or, a Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind.” Only seven copies of this treatise have ever been sold, and Scythrop dreams of being united with one of the buyers. His passions, though, become more earthy when he falls in love both with his cousin Marionetta and then also with a mysterious woman who appears in his apartment and begs him for asylum, thus creating a situation of romantic farce as he tries to decide between the two.
These events are interleaved between entertaining discussions among the varied guests at Nightmare Abbey, richly filled with humor, allusions and quotation.
Nightmare Abbey is probably Peacock’s most successful work of fiction, and helped establish his position as an important satirist of his times. His satire, though, is light-hearted rather than savage and is directed more at foolish opinions than attacking particular persons.
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- Author: Thomas Love Peacock
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“Pension. Pay given to a slave of state for treason to his country.” —Johnson’s Dictionary ↩
See Denys Montfort: Histoire Naturelle des Mollusques; Vues Générales, pp. 37, 38. (P.) The second half of this speech by Mr. Asterias and the opening sentence of his previous speech are a paraphrase from Montfort, pp. 37–9. ↩
There must be some mistake in this, for the whole honourable band of gentlemen-pensioners has resolved unanimously, that Mr. Burke was a very sublime person, particularly after he had prostituted his own soul, and betrayed his country and mankind, for £1,200 a year: yet he does not appear to have been a very terrible personage, and certainly went off with a very small portion of human respect, though he contrived to excite, in a great degree, the astonishment of all honest men. Our immaculate laureate (who gives us to understand that, if he had not been purified by holy matrimony into a mystical type, he would have died a virgin), is another sublime gentleman of the same genus: he very much astonished some persons when he sold his birthright for a pot of sack; but not even his Sosia has a grain of respect for him, though, doubtless, he thinks his name very terrible to the enemy, when he flourishes his criticopoeticopolitical tomahawk, and sets up his Indian yell for the blood of his old friends: but, at best, he is a mere political scarecrow, a man of straw, ridiculous to all who know of what materials he is made; and to none more so, than to those who have stuffed him, and set him up, as the Priapus of the garden of the golden apples of corruption. ↩
Childe Harold, canto 4. cxxiv. cxxvi. ↩
Childe Harold, canto 4. cxxiii. ↩
Childe Harold, canto 3. lxxi. ↩
Childe Harold, canto 4. cxxi. cxxxvi. ↩
Childe Harold, canto 4. cxxii. ↩
Sits, and will sit for ever. ↩
See The Sorrows of Werther, Letter 93. ↩
ColophonNightmare Abbey
was published in 1818 by
Thomas Love Peacock.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
David Grigg,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2006 by
Suzanne Shell, Tom Allen, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Vanitas Still Life,
a painting completed in 1670 by
Pieter van der Willigen.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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