Nightmare Abbey/Crotchet Castle

Thomas Love Peacock is literature's perfect individualist. <p/> 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. <p/>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.