Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Nightmare Abbey
    Nightmare Abbey
    Nightmare Abbey
    Ebook260 pages3 hours

    Nightmare Abbey

    By Thomas Love Peacock

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 1, 1964

    Read more from Thomas Love Peacock

    Related to Nightmare Abbey

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      DULCE DOMUM From The Wind In The Willows

      Nov 1, 2022

      DULCE DOMUM From The Wind In The Willows
      11 min read

    • Article

      Bard In The Woods

      Nov 30, 2020

      Bard In The Woods
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Stackpole Legend

      Mar 1, 2024

      The Stackpole Legend
      13 min read

    • Article

      Perfect Prose II

      May 15, 2020

      Perfect Prose II
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Modest Man

      Oct 17, 2019

      The Modest Man
      5 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

      Dec 9, 2017

      I tend to buy used books in bunches, which means the haul from some expeditions stays buried for weeks, months, years even. For this entry, I highlight three finds that, breaking custom, I bought and read almost immediately this year: Hugo Charteris’

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Inventions of Witches

      Oct 30, 2017

      The Inventions of Witches
      7 min read

    • Article

      Peace Comes With A Smile

      Nov 11, 2019

      Peace Comes With A Smile
      8 min read

    • Article

      All This Blood and Love

      Nov 22, 2017

      All This Blood and Love
      6 min read

    • Article

      ‘Bowlaway’: Featured Fiction from Elizabeth McCracken

      Feb 4, 2019

      What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed. The post ‘Bowlaway’: Featured Fiction from Elizabeth McCracken appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      Elsi, The Strange Maid

      Aug 29, 2018

      Elsi, The Strange Maid
      17 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2021

      If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied. —Rudyard Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War,” The Years Between, 1919 She consulted me, a glance, and said: “I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let’s have somethi

      4 min read

    • Article

      John Ashbery

      Mar 15, 2019

      He could understand the things at home.—Wallace Stevens, “Things of August” Scribbled on the expansive mist, the desireof many dwindles to usand our “activities,” wholesomeor otherwise. Soon it becomes apparentthat neither they nor I have any prise o

      4 min read

    • Article

      Worlds Of Ink And Paper

      Nov 22, 2022

      As a young girl, I still remember my dear mother, smile on her face, curled up with Family Circle magazine in her lap. She was engrossed in an article titled “Butternut Wisdom,” written by Gladys Taber. At my age, it didn’t mean a thing to me. But as

      6 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Jun 1, 2023

      Table Talk
      11 min read

    • Article

      Readersʼ Letters

      Jul 27, 2022

      Readersʼ Letters
      6 min read

    • Article

      Reader's Letter

      May 31, 2023

      SIR: I was astonished to read (Spring issue) that Hunter Davies believes he may be the only person left in the UK who has milk delivered in glass bottles every morning. Oop ’ere in t’north, we have milk delivered in this way. We also have Ringtons Te

      6 min read

    • Article

      On Country

      Nov 9, 2016

      On Country
      5 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 1, 2022

      Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. —Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” tr. by Clare C

      4 min read

    • Article

      Four Of A Kind

      May 3, 2023

      Four Of A Kind
      4 min read

    • Article

      Odd Jobs

      Jul 19, 2017

      Odd Jobs
      3 min read

    • Article

      Cathedral Spotting At Its Best

      Nov 3, 2021

      IF Simon Jenkins were a building, what listing would he receive? Certainly Grade I, but I suspect a special super-plus category would be required. Many people would be content with a career as newspaper editor, columnist, National Trust chairman and

      5 min read

    Reviews for Nightmare Abbey

    3.5/5

    85 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I read [Nightmare Abbey] because it came up as a recommendation for people who liked [[Jane Austen]]'s [Northanger Abbey], a novel I read and loved earlier this year. While the two novels do have similarities, I found [Nightmare Abbey] to be much more like [Candide] in its skewering of the Romantic movement.This one will probably be best appreciated by people who are pretty familiar with the Romantics, as Peacock makes many references to a number of Romantic works and based most of his characters on some of the leading names of the movement, including [[Percy Bysshe Shelley]], [[Mary Shelley]], [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]], and [[Lord Byron]]. Although knowing all of the allusions aren't necessary for enjoying the book, which has some great passages, the Wikipedia page can help with some of the more esoteric passages.While [Nightmare Abbey] wasn't the book I was expecting it to be, I did enjoy the book that it is. It will never be one of my all-time favorites, but its wit, and short length, will probably have me rereading it in the future.
    • 4/5
      Young Scythrop Glowry lives with his father in a desolate castle, his bitter mother having died suddenly, to his father's joy. Scythrop recently graduated from a university, where his head was filled with nothing but he picked up the habit of drinking too much. Both Scythrop and his father enjoy the miserable things in life, but Scythrop is young and quickly falls in love with Emily, who quickly marries another, leaving Scythorpe in a romantic depression. When his father's many miserable friends come to visit, there also arrives beautiful and cruel Marionetta, and The Honourable Mr. Listless, who lies on the sofa reading, as doing any more is too taxing.Published in 1818, this is a satire of the Gothic romance novels that were popular at the time. The characters are thinly veiled caricatures of Lord Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth.
    • 2/5
      I'm reviewing this four years to the day that I finished reading it. Lasting impressions? I can barely remember it, though words like "boredom" and "dull" come to mind. I know the story didn't come close to the promising title.It would doubtless be a nightmare to read it twice.
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed this spoof on the Kantian/Transcendentalist books of the late 1700s & early 1800s.
    • 4/5
      Very funny if somewhat outdated. To be read as a spoof of romantic writing and, perhaps, philosophical debates but - as much satire - wanting on character, plot development.
    • 4/5
      The short, satirical novels of Thomas Love Peacock are unlike any other genre. They are often recognized as "novels", but they also have characteristics of drama or colloquia. They do not have a plot, but consist of pleasant and often humorous conversations. In these short novels, Peacock satirized his contemporaries and issues of his day. Despite the fact that most of the satire is lost on the average twenty-first century reader, they are still very readable, and might even provoke an occasional smile, but from what I understand they may have provoked bulderous laughter in their own day.Nightmare Abbey (1818) is the most famous of Peacock's short novels. Thomas Love Peacock was a contemporary and friend of most of the Romantic poets and their circle. In Nightmare Abbey some of these poets appear in disguise, Percy Bysshe Shelley as “Scythrop Glowry,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “Mr Ferdinando Flosky” and, Lord Byron in as “Mr Cypress” but I must admit that I did not recognize them as such. According to the introduction, Shelley is reported to have said that his house was instantly recognisable in the story, but I suppose it would require a great deal of biographical information to see through that. In fact, Raymond Wright writes that (at least in 1986, i.e. when the introduction was written) many of the side characters in Peacock's novels had not yet been identified.However, as I said before, all that literary criticism can be left for what it is, and these short novels can be enjoyed in their own right, with an occasional chuckle.
    • 3/5
      In 2015 The Guardian published a list of the 100 best novels published in English, listed in chronological order of publication. Under Covid inspired lockdown, I have taken up the challenge.This is book 9 in the chronological listing. Short, novella more than novel, and quite different from earlier books. This is a bit of fun, nudging the ribs of the various stereotypes in gentle society of the times (published in 1818).As an aside, many of the early books in this list portray love affairs of the upper class of England at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, one would have to say that the mating habits of the time and class seem uniformly ineffective in every way. The pool of possible partners is so small; the capacity to get to know prospective spouses is so limited; and the influence of parents and others so inordinately large, that it is a wonder that Britain survived the era and became a world power!
    • 4/5
      It's been nearly thirty years since I've read this. All I can remember of it is that I thought it quite good. Very funny. One of those few comedies of the 19th century to carry over in mirth to the present day.

    Book preview

    Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Nightmare Abbey, by Thomas Love Peacock

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: Nightmare Abbey

    Author: Thomas Love Peacock

    Posting Date: November 19, 2011 [EBook #9909] Release Date: February, 2006 First Posted: October 30, 2003 Last Updated: July 17, 2010

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHTMARE ABBEY ***

    Produced by Suzanne Shell, Tom Allen, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

    NIGHTMARE ABBEY

    By

    Thomas Love Peacock

    CONTENTS

    NIGHTMARE ABBEY

    NOTES TO Nightmare Abbey

    NIGHTMARE ABBEY:

    BY

    THE AUTHOR OF HEADLONG HALL.

    * * * * *

      There's a dark lantern of the spirit,

      Which none see by but those who bear it,

      That makes them in the dark see visions

      And hag themselves with apparitions,

      Find racks for their own minds, and vaunt

      Of their own misery and want.

      BUTLER.

    * * * * *

    LONDON:

    1818.

    MATTHEW. Oh! it's your only fine humour, sir. Your true melancholy breeds your perfect fine wit, sir. I am melancholy myself, divers times, sir; and then do I no more but take pen and paper presently, and overflow you half a score or a dozen of sonnets at a sitting.

    STEPHEN. Truly, sir, and I love such things out of measure.

    MATTHEW. Why, I pray you, sir, make use of my study: it's at your service.

    STEPHEN. I thank you, sir, I shall be bold, I warrant you. Have you a stool there, to be melancholy upon?

    BEN JONSON, Every Man in his Humour, Act 3, Sc. I

    Ay esleu gazouiller et siffler oye, comme dit le commun proverbe, entre les cygnes, plutoust que d'estre entre tant de gentils poëtes et faconds orateurs mut du tout estimé.

    RABELAIS, Prol. L. 5

    * * * * *

    CHAPTER I

    Nightmare Abbey, a venerable family-mansion, in a highly picturesque state of semi-dilapidation, pleasantly situated on a strip of dry land between the sea and the fens, at the verge of the county of Lincoln, had the honour to be the seat of Christopher Glowry, Esquire. This gentleman was naturally of an atrabilarious temperament, and much troubled with those phantoms of indigestion which are commonly called blue devils. He had been deceived in an early friendship: he had been crossed in love; and had offered his hand, from pique, to a lady, who accepted it from interest, and who, in so doing, violently tore asunder the bonds of a tried and youthful attachment. Her vanity was gratified by being the mistress of a very extensive, if not very lively, establishment; but all the springs of her sympathies were frozen. Riches she possessed, but that which enriches them, the participation of affection, was wanting. All that they could purchase for her became indifferent to her, because that which they could not purchase, and which was more valuable than themselves, she had, for their sake, thrown away. She discovered, when it was too late, that she had mistaken the means for the end—that riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness. In this wilful blight of her affections, she found them valueless as means: they had been the end to which she had immolated all her affections, and were now the only end that remained to her. She did not confess this to herself as a principle of action, but it operated through the medium of unconscious self-deception, and terminated in inveterate avarice. She laid on external things the blame of her mind's internal disorder, and thus became by degrees an accomplished scold. She often went her daily rounds through a series of deserted apartments, every creature in the house vanishing at the creak of her shoe, much more at the sound of her voice, to which the nature of things affords no simile; for, as far as the voice of woman, when attuned by gentleness and love, transcends all other sounds in harmony, so far does it surpass all others in discord, when stretched into unnatural shrillness by anger and impatience.

    Mr Glowry used to say that his house was no better than a spacious kennel, for every one in it led the life of a dog. Disappointed both in love and in friendship, and looking upon human learning as vanity, he had come to a conclusion that there was but one good thing in the world, videlicet, a good dinner; and this his parsimonious lady seldom suffered him to enjoy: but, one morning, like Sir Leoline in Christabel, 'he woke and found his lady dead,' and remained a very consolate widower, with one small child.

    This only son and heir Mr Glowry had christened Scythrop, from the name of a maternal ancestor, who had hanged himself one rainy day in a fit of toedium vitae, and had been eulogised by a coroner's jury in the comprehensive phrase of felo de se; on which account, Mr Glowry held his memory in high honour, and made a punchbowl of his skull.

    When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head: having finished his education to the high satisfaction of the master and fellows of his college, who had, in testimony of their approbation, presented him with a silver fish-slice, on which his name figured at the head of a laudatory inscription in some semi-barbarous dialect of Anglo-Saxonised Latin.

    His fellow-students, however, who drove tandem and random in great perfection, and were connoisseurs in good inns, had taught him to drink deep ere he departed. He had passed much of his time with these choice spirits, and had seen the rays of the midnight lamp tremble on many a lengthening file of empty bottles. He passed his vacations sometimes at Nightmare Abbey, sometimes in London, at the house of his uncle, Mr Hilary, a very cheerful and elastic gentleman, who had married the sister of the melancholy Mr Glowry. The company that frequented his house was the gayest of the gay. Scythrop danced with the ladies and drank with the gentlemen, and was pronounced by both a very accomplished charming fellow, and an honour to the university.

    At the house of Mr Hilary, Scythrop first saw the beautiful Miss Emily Girouette. He fell in love; which is nothing new. He was favourably received; which is nothing strange. Mr Glowry and Mr Girouette had a meeting on the occasion, and quarrelled about the terms of the bargain; which is neither new nor strange. The lovers were torn asunder, weeping and vowing everlasting constancy; and, in three weeks after this tragical event, the lady was led a smiling bride to the altar, by the Honourable Mr Lackwit; which is neither strange nor new.

    Scythrop received this intelligence at Nightmare Abbey, and was half distracted on the occasion. It was his first disappointment, and preyed deeply on his sensitive spirit. His father, to comfort him, read him a Commentary on Ecclesiastes, which he had himself composed, and which demonstrated incontrovertibly that all is vanity. He insisted particularly on the text, 'One man among a thousand have I found, but a woman amongst all those have I not found.'

    'How could he expect it,' said Scythrop, 'when the whole thousand were locked up in his seraglio? His experience is no precedent for a free state of society like that in which we live.'

    'Locked up or at large,' said Mr Glowry, 'the result is the same: their minds are always locked up, and vanity and interest keep the key. I speak feelingly, Scythrop.'

    'I am sorry for it, sir,' said Scythrop. 'But how is it that their minds are locked up? The fault is in their artificial education, which studiously models them into mere musical dolls, to be set out for sale in the great toy-shop of society.'

    'To be sure,' said Mr Glowry, 'their education is not so well finished as yours has been; and your idea of a musical doll is good. I bought one myself, but it was confoundedly out of tune; but, whatever be the cause, Scythrop, the effect is certainly this, that one is pretty nearly as good as another, as far as any judgment can be formed of them before marriage. It is only after marriage that they show their true qualities, as I know by bitter experience. Marriage is, therefore, a lottery, and the less choice and selection a man bestows on his ticket the better; for, if he has incurred considerable pains and expense to obtain a lucky number, and his lucky number proves a blank, he experiences not a simple, but a complicated disappointment;

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1