Nightmare Abbey

Thomas Love Peacock aimed his wit squarely at the fashionable gloom of his Romantic contemporaries. At the half-ruined Nightmare Abbey, the misanthropic widower Christopher Glowry presides over a household of eccentrics while his lovesick son Scythrop dithers between two very different women and hides a mysterious fugitive in his tower. The talkers who drift through the house are thinly veiled portraits of Peacock’s circle, with Scythrop modeled on Shelley, the transcendental Mr. Flosky on Coleridge, and the doom-laden poet Mr. Cypress on Byron. Their absurd conversations puncture the era’s taste for despair, German metaphysics, and gothic dread. Short, sharp, and genuinely funny, it remains the best loved of Peacock’s conversation novels. A free PDF and EPUB edition is available here.