Pandemonium ensues!
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Thomas Love Peacock invented the novel of ideas, which sees the coming together in one place of a number of "opinionated faddists" with diametrically opposite views for the purpose of a "good dinner" and good light-hearted satire.
Here are two of his best attempts, Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle, where the assembled faddists between them disseminate and discredit the intricacies of contemporary artistic and political culture. Nightmare Abbey sees Scythrop (gloomy-face) Glowry play host to an assortment of morbid and eccentric caricatures including those of Mr. Flosky (Coleridge) and Cypress (Byron) all chasing, or being chased by, ghosts, mermaids, drunken French valets and good dinners served up on a plate of classical allusion, metaphysical obscurity and a wilful lack of common-sense. Crotchet Castle, the later work, provides more of the stock Peacock scene with characters this time focused on dismantling any serious conceptions of industry and political economy.
Peacock's characters are all joyously tangled up in their own obsessions, ranging from Kantian Transcendentalism to Ichthyology, and which invariably send them into either verbal collisions around the dinner-table or a more crudely pantomime type, colliding and banging down stairs "like two billiard-balls in one pocket". He has a great sense for the absurd and has me laughing out loud over an otherwise assumedly unpromising collection of comedy characters.
Peacock was labelled `the laughing philosopher' in his time, and prided himself on his wide knowledge of classical literature and an Epicurean sensibility, but don't let this put you off. His novels are pure nonsense; they're a veritable rag-bag of farce, romantic idealism, philosophical absurdity all coloured with contemporary allusions and harmless rib-jabbing at what he saw as the unnecessary ideologico-scientifico- improbabo-historico-distractions from the simple and natural virtues of "a very good dinner."
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Two hilarious satires.
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Peacock's satirical novels mock various aspects of nineteenth century life; Nightmare Abbey (1818) examines the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century and Crotchet Castle (1831) pokes fun at the political economists and scientific philosophers of the same era. Most of the principal characters in Nightmare Abbey are based on real life figures who were known to Peacock. He was a close friend of Shelley, who was caricatured as the hero of Nightmare Abbey. The book is very readable today both because of the alternative slant we see on people (Byron and Coleridge as well as Shelley) whose works many of us will have read and because Peacock's works are genuinely funny. This is one of the few books that makes me laugh aloud. Crotchet Castle is, perhaps, less accessible to us, as few of us will be as interested in the characters mimiced in the novel. It is still extremely amusing though, and Peacock's portrayal of fly-by-night business men will surely be valid for centuries to come.
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