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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 123 X 174 x 110 mm 236 pages |
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK Nightmare Abbey 1818 Peacock, himself a minor poet, plays a special role in the second phase of the Romantic cycle. He wrote to amuse those about whom he wrote, who happened - Shelley in particular - to be his friends. He was a satirist inside the friendly camp whose fun-poking was good-humoured enough not to make him enemies. So the plot of Nightmare Abbey, if plot there be, involves Scythrop (Shelley) and two ladies; and its argument, if it can be said to have one, is against the morbid and obscure in literature, represented mainly by Mr Flosky (Coleridge) but also by Mr Cypress (Byron). Do his characterisations strike the present-day reader as just? Probably not. Nevertheless the writing has a brilliance that offers a unique insight into some of the personalities and preoccupations of the Romantic period. £25 $48 ‘The beauty of this process [synthetic reasoning] is, that at every step it strikes out into two branches, in a compound ratio of ramification; so that you are perfectly sure of losing your way, and keeping your mind in perfect health by the perpetual exercise of an interminable quest; and for these reasons I have christened my eldest son Emanuel Kant Flosky.' |
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