Nightmare Abbey (Broadview Editions)

This 1818 novel is set in a former abbey whose owner, Christopher Glowry, is host to visitors who enjoy his hospitality and engage in endless debate. Among these guests are figures recognizable to Peacock’s contemporaries, including characters based on Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mr. Glowry’s son Scythrop (also modeled on a famous Romantic, Peacock’s friend Percy Bysshe Shelley) locks himself up in a tower where he reads German tragedies and transcendental philosophy and develops a “passion for reforming the world.” Disappointed in love, a sorrowful Scythrop decides the only thing to do is to commit suicide, but circumstances persuade him to instead follow his father in a love of misanthropy and Madeira. In addition to satire and comic romance, Nightmare Abbey presents a biting critique of the texts we view as central to British romanticism.

This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a range of illuminating contemporary documents on the novel’s reception and its German and British literary contexts. A selection of Peacock’s critical and autobiographical writings is also included.

Lisa Vargo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the editor of the Broadview edition of Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1997).