Nightmare Abbey

1818, 1964 Norton Library edition
Thomas Love Peacock
Nightmare Abbey
Original price unknown, bought used for 95 cents
Frayed paperback
B+

Yes, I own two books from 1818 whose titles are N_____ Abbey.  This story is also a parody of Gothic fiction, but it's so much more.  It is a laugh-out-loud satire of just about every intellectual trend of its time, including Wollstonecraftian feminism.  I don't get every joke of course (which, along with the lack of an actual plot, is why I can't rate this higher), but some things never go out of style.

Take this passage for instance:
"When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head:  having finished his education to the highest satisfaction of the master and fellows of his college, who had, in testimony of their approbation, presented him with a silver fish-slice, on which his name figured at the head of a laudatory inscription in some semi-barbarous dialect of Anglo-Saxonised Latin.

Even the way that Scythrop, who's lost both his fiancees, considers a suicide worthy of Werther but decides instead on a glass of Madeira is funny.  And I love the thing about "the south-western tower, which was ruinous and full of owls."  

The way I discovered this novella was suitably circuitous.  Sexual Politics (1970) by Kate Millett contains an analysis of George Meredith's The Egoist (1879), and Meredith was briefly Peacock's son-in-law.  In my early 20s, after I dropped out of college, I was reading everything that sounded interesting, so both Meredith and Peacock got added to my list, and, yes, Meredith will be coming up in the next few weeks.  (Millett is a long way off.)