Nightmare Abbey; Crotchet Castle

Thomas Love Peacock is literature’s perfect individualist.<br><br> He has points in common with Aristophanes, Plato, Rabelais, Voltaire, and even Aldous Huxley, but resembles none of them; we can talk of the satirical novel of ideas, but his satire is too cheery and good-natured, his novel too rambling, and his ideas too jovially destructive for the label to stick. <br><br>A romantic in his youth and a friend of Shelley, he happily made hay of the romantic movement in <i>Nightmare Abbey</i>, clamping Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley himself in a kind of painless pillory. And in <i>Crotchet Castle</i> he did no less for the political economists, pitting his gifts of exaggeration and ridicule against scientific progress and March of Mind. Yet the romantic in him never died: the long, witty, and indecisive talk of his characters is set in wild, natural scenery which Peacock describes with true feeling.