Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (top 10 best books of all time txt) ๐
Description
Published in 1818, Peacockโs novella Nightmare Abbey is a gentle satire of the then-popular gothic movement in literature. He pokes fun at the genreโs obsessions and most of the bookโs 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 โPhilosophical Gas; or, a Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind.โ 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 Peacockโs 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.
Read free book ยซNightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (top 10 best books of all time txt) ๐ยป - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: Thomas Love Peacock
Read book online ยซNightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (top 10 best books of all time txt) ๐ยป. Author - Thomas Love Peacock
He now became troubled with the passion for reforming the world.2 He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with absolute sovereignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He slept with horrid mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves. He passed whole mornings in his study, immersed in gloomy reverie, stalking about the room in his nightcap, which he pulled over his eyes like a cowl, and folding his striped calico dressing-gown about him like the mantle of a conspirator.
โAction,โ thus he soliloquised, โis the result of opinion, and to new-model opinion would be to new-model society. Knowledge is power; it is in the hands of a few, who employ it to mislead the many, for their own selfish purposes of aggrandisement and appropriation. What if it were in the hands of a few who should employ it to lead the many? What if it were universal, and the multitude were enlightened? No. The many must be always in leading-strings; but let them have wise and honest conductors. A few to think, and many to act; that is the only basis of perfect society. So thought the ancient philosophers: they had their esoterical and exoterical doctrines. So thinks the sublime Kant, who delivers his oracles in language which none but the initiated can comprehend. Such were the views of those secret associations of illuminati, which were the terror of superstition and tyranny, and which, carefully selecting wisdom and genius from the great wilderness of society, as the bee selects honey from the flowers of the thorn and the nettle, bound all human excellence in a chain, which, if it had not been prematurely broken, would have commanded opinion, and regenerated the world.โ
Scythrop proceeded to meditate on the practicability of reviving a confederation of regenerators. To get a clear view of his own ideas, and to feel the pulse of the wisdom and genius of the age, he wrote and published a treatise, in which his meanings were carefully wrapt up in the monkโs hood of transcendental technology, but filled with hints of matter deep and dangerous, which he thought would set the whole nation in a ferment; and he awaited the result in awful expectation, as a miner who has fired a train awaits the explosion of a rock. However, he listened and heard nothing; for the explosion, if any ensued, was not sufficiently loud to shake a single leaf of the ivy on the towers of Nightmare Abbey; and some months afterwards he received a letter from his bookseller, informing him that only seven copies had been sold, and concluding with a polite request for the balance.
Scythrop did not despair. โSeven copies,โ he thought, โhave been sold. Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be the seven golden candlesticks with which I will illuminate the world.โ
Scythrop had a certain portion of mechanical genius, which his romantic projects tended to develop. He constructed models of cells and recesses, sliding panels and secret passages, that would have baffled the skill of the Parisian police. He took the opportunity of his fatherโs absence to smuggle a dumb carpenter into the Abbey, and between them they gave reality to one of these models in Scythropโs tower. Scythrop foresaw that a great leader of human regeneration would be involved in fearful dilemmas, and determined, for the benefit of mankind in general, to adopt all possible precautions for the preservation of himself.
The servants, even the women, had been tutored into silence. Profound stillness reigned throughout and around the Abbey, except when the occasional shutting of a door would peal in long reverberations through the galleries, or the heavy tread of the pensive butler would wake the hollow echoes of the hall. Scythrop stalked about like the grand inquisitor, and the servants flitted past him like familiars. In his evening meditations on the terrace, under the ivy of the ruined tower, the only sounds that came to his ear were the rustling of the wind in the ivy, the plaintive voices of the feathered choristers, the owls, the occasional striking of the Abbey clock, and the monotonous dash of the sea on its low and level shore. In the meantime, he drank Madeira, and laid deep schemes for a thorough repair of the crazy fabric of human nature.
IIIMr. Glowry returned from London with the loss of his lawsuit. Justice was with him, but the law was against him. He found Scythrop in a mood most sympathetically tragic; and they vied with each other in enlivening their cups by lamenting the depravity of this degenerate age, and occasionally interspersing diverse grim jokes about graves, worms, and epitaphs. Mr. Glowryโs friends, whom we have mentioned in the first chapter, availed themselves of his return to pay him a simultaneous visit. At the same time arrived Scythropโs friend and fellow-collegian,
Comments (0)