Nightmare Abbey - Literary Significance & Criticism

Literary Significance & Criticism

Nightmare Abbey is generally considered to be the most lastingly successful of Peacock's novels. Together with four other Peacock novels – Headlong Hall, Melincourt, Crotchet Castle and Gryll Grange – it comprises a matching set of satirical works that are quite exceptional in English literature. As a satirist Peacock owed something to Rabelais, Swift and to Voltaire and various French writers of the 18th century; but as a novelist he seems to owe little if anything to his predecessors. He tended to dramatize where traditional novelists narrated; he is more concerned with the interplay of ideas and opinions than of feelings and emotions; his dramatis personae is more likely to consist of a cast of more or less equal characters than of one outstanding hero or heroine and a host of minor auxiliaries; his novels have a tendency to approximate the Classical unities, with few changes of scene and few if any subplots; his novels are novels of conversation rather than novels of action; in fact, Peacock is so much more interested in what his characters say to one another than in what they do to one another that he often sets out entire chapters of his novels in dialogue form. Plato's Symposium is the literary ancestor of these works, by way of the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus, in which (as in much of Peacock) the conversation relates less to exalted philosophical themes than to the points of a good fish dinner.

Peacock's gentle and bantering sense of satire lacks the caustic indignation of Swift or the cutting edge of Rabelais. Often the targets of his satire are his own friends and acquaintances. It would be more accurate to say that Peacock's satire is directed not at individuals but at the opinions they hold or the popular nostrums they subscribe to. In the preface to the collected edition of his novels (1837) he makes it clear that the characters of his novels are mouthpieces for such things when he lists them under such categories as, perfectibilians, deteriorationists, status-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all the sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque and lovers of good dinners.