Teasing the Romantics

Thomas Love Peacock, the beautifully named comic novelist, friend of the Romantics and high-flying East India Company executive, is not well known today, but as recently as the 1920s you could drop his name in literate circles and be confident that people knew who you were talking about.

The hyper-sophisticated young Aldous Huxley, for example, referred to his first novel Crome Yellow, published in 1921, as ‘Peacockian’. Peacock’s technique is to bung a load of intellectuals, both male and female, into a country house for a few days, and tease them mercilessly but affectionately. Like Huxley in Crome Yellow, Peacock based his creations on the real-life bohemians of his day. For fans of the Romantic poets and their affairs, then, Nightmare Abbey offers delicious satire, Blackadderish in its wit and silliness. Peacock was close friends with Shelley and knew Coleridge and Byron. He’d read the works of those godparents of Romanticism, the novelist and anarchist philosopher William Godwin and the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s parents. Wollstonecraft died in 1797 aged just 38, ten days after giving birth to Mary. Frankenstein was, like Nightmare Abbey, published in 1818. Peacock had proposed to and been rejected by young Claire Clairmont, Godwin’s stepdaughter from his first wife. As Romantophiles will know, Claire had a fling with Lord Byron when she was 18, a liaison which produced a daughter, Allegra. As you also probably know, Claire and Mary had run off with Percy to Italy. In 1817, Peacock and Shelley – now back in Blighty and married to Mary – lived near each other in the Thames-side town of Marlow and saw each other almost every day. Peacock had helped Shelley – a proponent of free love – through the collapse of his first marriage to poor Harriet Westbrook (who later drowned herself), and Shelley paid Peacock £120 a year to look after his business affairs (he was now a well-off trustafarian, having secured an annuity of £1,000 – roughly £75,000 today – from his father). It was in Marlow that Peacock wrote Nightmare Abbey, and in Marlow that Mary finished writing Frankenstein. This was a time when a drowsy numbness seemed to pain everyone’s soul. Misery was fashionable. The French Revolution had excited and then disappointed the young Romantic poets. There was a trend for reading gloomy humourless Gothic novels, things like Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, his novel about suicide published in 1774, and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, of 1764. So along comes Peacock with his sense of humour and sparkle and lightness of touch. Jokes and wise observations abound right from the first page. Nightmare Abbey itself is described as being in ‘a highly picturesque state of semi-dilapidation’ and is covered in ivy and hooting owls. It’s presided over by the gloomy, widowed patriarch Christopher Glowry, whose late wife, observes Peacock, ‘laid on external things the blame of her mind’s internal disorder, and thus became by degrees an accomplished scold’. We all know someone like that. Glowry is said to have an ‘atrabilarious’ temperament, which, as I don’t need to tell you, derives from the Greek for ‘black bile’ (as ‘melancholic’ derives from the Latin for ‘black bile’). He chooses servants for their Gothic names. ‘His butler was Raven; his steward was Crow; his valet was Skellet.’ A servant called Deathshead turns out to be disappointingly cheerful and is therefore sacked. Glowry’s son is called Scythrop, from the Greek for ‘of sad or gloomy countenance’ (Peacock was well-read in ancient Greek, which he had taught himself, having left school at 13). Scythrop is loosely based on Shelley and lives in his own tower, to which he periodically retreats. Scythrop is concerned with ‘reforming the world’ and has published a book called Philosophical Gas; or, a Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind. He’d expected its publication to ‘set the whole nation in a ferment’, but no explosion ensued and to date it had sold only seven copies. Also at the gathering are Mr Flosky, a philosophical poet modelled on Coleridge, and witty young Marionetta, based on Harriet Westbrook. We also have the intellectual Stella, based on Mary Shelley, and Mr Cypress, a caricature of Byron. Then there’s Mr Listless, a complete idler, who sees little point in doing anything at all. ‘I should like to know’, he says at one point, ‘if there is anything better or pleasanter, than the state of existing and doing nothing?’ What a lot of free-thinking, free-loving, freewheeling individuals! As an aside, I wonder whether Dickens was inspired by Peacock’s hilarious and brilliant names? We know that Peacock contributed stories to Bentley’s Miscellany, a magazine edited by Dickens, so there is no doubt that the younger writer would have been schooled in Peacock. I certainly see Peacockian elements in The Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit, though Dickens’s reach was infinitely more expansive. As for Peacock’s own views, he wrote to a friend saying he had rejected Christianity as ‘a grovelling, misanthropical, blood-thirsty superstition’, and described himself as ‘a complete Academic’, in other words, a follower of Socrates and Plato. Peacock was also a fan of Epicurus, the most rational and least religious of the ancient philosophers. In its form, Nightmare Abbey is almost experimental. Chunks of conventional narrative alternate with bits of theatrical dialogue, and the assembled cast sometimes breaks into song or poetry. I’d love to see the book dramatized for television, or perhaps made into a silly musical, but doubtless producers would consider it too highbrow. After all, Flosky’s utterances are completely baffling:

According to Berkeley, the esse of things is percipi. They exist as they are perceived. But, leaving for the present, as far as relates to the material world, the materialists, hyloists, and antihyloists, to settle this point among them, which is indeed . . .

The plot, as far as there is one, is briefly this: Marionetta (Harriet) flirts with Glowry’s son Scythrop and he falls in love with her. But little does Marionetta realize that she has a rival in the shape of the intellectual Stella (Mary Shelley), who smuggles herself into Scythrop’s tower one day and, to his delight, reveals that she is one of the seven fans of his book Philosophical Gas, and a feminist too. ‘I submit not to my sex’s slavery. I am, like yourself, a lover of freedom, and I carry my theory into practice.’ She then quotes from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women: ‘They alone are subject to blind authority who have no reliance on their own strength.’ Scythrop falls in love on the spot. So now he has two lovers. And suffice to say, farcical interludes ensue. As a diversion from the main plot, we’re treated to an evening with Mr Cypress – or Lord Byron. He appears at Nightmare Abbey, and informs the assembled company that he is about to travel to Italy:

Sir, I have quarrelled with my wife, and a man who has quarrelled with his wife is absolved from all duty to his country. I have written an ode to tell the people as much, and they may take it as they list.

It’s up to Mr Hilary, Mr Glowry’s brother, to represent normality. He argues against the notion that genius and melancholy are inevitably interwoven. ‘To represent vice and misery as the necessary accompaniments of genius, is as mischievous as it is false.’ He later adds: ‘We have sufficient proofs on record that Shakespeare and Socrates were the most festive of companions.’ In the end the reader is pleased to learn that Scythrop does not commit suicide, as he threatens to do at one point, but instead orders a bottle of Madeira with which to drown his sorrows. What a joy! But in 1819 Peacock quit writing novels and got a proper job. He worked for the opium-selling, slave-trading, army-running East India Company, where he stayed for thirty-seven years, specializing in steam navigation. The move was the equivalent of giving up poetry in order to work for Google. The EIC was a vast enterprise: its turnover in 1801 had been £7.6 million, the equivalent of £500 million today. Maybe this was a sensible move. After all, Greek poetry and experimental novels don’t pay the rent. By 1836 Peacock was earning the equivalent of £200,000 a year and had lunch every week with the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Peacock’s colleague was James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill. So, having been a close witness of the most subversive poetical movement ever seen on these shores, he was now at the heart of the Victorian capitalist enterprise. Peacock’s wife and two daughters predeceased him. In 1865, a fire broke out in his house at Halliford, Middlesex, and he died the following year. He was 81. Strangely, there are no decent contemporary editions of Nightmare Abbey available. My own copy is a second-hand Penguin edition which also includes Peacock’s equally brilliant novella Crotchet Castle. Seek it out, become a Peacockian: you will not regret it.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Tom Hodgkinson 2025