Nightmare Abbey
Nightmare Abbey is an 1818 novella by Thomas Love Peacock which makes good-natured fun of contemporary literary trends. Insofar as the novel may be said to have a plot, it follows the fortunes of Christopher Glowry, a morose widower who lives with his only son Scythrop in the isolated family mansion, Nightmare Abbey, in Lincolnshire. The book is Peacock's most well-liked and frequently-read work.
The novel was a topical work of Gothic fiction in which the author satirised tendencies in contemporary English literature, in particular Romanticism's obsession with morbid subjects, misanthropy and transcendental philosophical systems. Most of its characters are based on historical figures whom Peacock wished to pillory.
It has been observed that "the plots of Peacock's novels are mostly devices for bringing the persons together and the persons are merely the embodiment of whims and theories, or types of a class". Nightmare Abbey embodies the critique of a particular mentality and pillories the contemporary vogue for the macabre. To his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, Peacock described the object of his novel as being "to bring to a sort of philosophical focus a few of the morbidities of modern literature". Appearing in the same year as Northanger Abbey, it similarly contrasts the product of the inflamed imagination, or what Peacock's Mr Hilary describes as the "conspiracy against cheerfulness", with the commonplace course of everyday life, with the aid of light-hearted ridicule.
Excerpted from Nightmare Abbey on Wikipedia.
Nightmare Abbey
| Author | Thomas Love Peacock |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Genre | Gothic Fiction, Romances |
| Copyright | Public domain worldwide. |
| Book cover | - |
| Ebooks | Project Gutenberg |
| Scans | Google-digitized |
| Audio | Librivox | Internet Archive Reader: Mark F. Smith 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 |
| Read online | Nightmare Abbey |