Analysis of Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 12, 2025

In his third and most popular novel, Nightmare Abbey, Thomas Love Peacock supplied a parody of contemporary literature and authors that greatly resembled in format his previous satires, Headlong Hall (1816) and Melincourt (1817). All three contain little by way of plot, depending instead upon energetic Socratic dialogue among their diverse characters to advance a purposely thin story. The characters themselves bore the greatest importance, all representing persons and/or various ideologies of Peacock’s era.

Peacock expects readers of Nightmare Abbey to be informed regarding British political, social, and intellectual controversy in order to understand its points. As indicated by the novel’s title, he takes on the Gothic novel, as well as the romantically idealized theme of melancholy. In his caricatures of romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Coleridge, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and novelist William Godwin, author of the Gothic work Mandeville and father of horror writer Mary Godwin Shelley, he seeks to, as he explained to Shelley in a letter, “bring to a sort of philosophical focus a few of the morbidities of modern literature.” He hoped to mount an attack against the “black bile” represented in works like Byron’s lengthy Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which included the horror of cannibalism, and he footnotes all references in the novel to that morbid work. Peacock thus ridicules what he conceived of as excess found in the romantic melancholy marking much of the popular poetry and fiction of the early 19th century.

The novel’s setting contains the predictable machinery of Gothic fiction, including secret passages and dark mysterious towers, but Peacock’s major focus remains on the abbey’s inhabitants, and the anticipated contrived dialogue of the genre is conspicuously absent. In its place appears the animated interchange between the abbey’s master, Mr. Glowry, and fellow misanthropes Mr. Toobad, Mr. Flosky (Coleridge), Mr. Cypress (Byron), and Mr. Listless (the consumer of popular literature), in addition to Scythrop Glowry (Shelley), Glowry’s son. Scythrop is a foppish, weak-willed ineffectual romantic who parodies the traditional devilish Gothic villain. Once hurt by misplaced love for Miss Emily Girouette, Scythrop “was a burnt child, and dreaded the fire of female eyes,” as did all Gothic figures that suffered for love. Dour servants with suggestive surnames, like Raven, Crow, and Graves, surround the men. Another character, Mr. Hilary, may be the closest to a caricature of Peacock himself, as he roundly criticizes the Gothic and romantic literature valued by the other members of the party.

Rounding out the cast are Scythrop’s cousin Marionetta and Toobad’s daughter, Celinda, nicknamed Stella, both of whom form love interests for Scythrop. He discusses with the philosophical Celinda his idea to make life imitate art, and acts on that instinct when he proposes to Marionetta that they imbibe one another’s blood as testimony to their devotion. The drinking of blood was a favorite Gothic device, found in the German novel Horrid Mysteries, which Scythrop keeps under his pillow. When Glowry asks Scythrop whom he loves, he replies, “Celinda—Marionetta—either—both.” Glowry protests, “That may do very well in a German tragedy,” but that it will not do in Lincolnshire, and Scythrop declares he will shoot himself. Scythrop never does decide which woman to romance seriously, and so he loses both, drowning his sorrow in Madeira wine.

Peacock cloaks Flosky’s remarks in a metaphysical terminology that satirizes Byron’s melancholy approach to poetry, while Cypress’s rejoinders represent Coleridge’s position as the foremost authority on the German romantics and his ideas regarding organic form. In one discussion, Cypress remarks, as Peacock quotes from the fourth canto of Childe Harold, “The mind is diseased of its own beauty, and fevers into false creation. The forms which the sculptor’s soul has seized exist only in himself.” Flosky replies, “Permit me to discept. They are the mediums of common forms combined and arranged into a common standard.” While Peacock developed multiple characters in his various works to represent Coleridge, Flosky is considered his most skillful. As noted by critic Charles Dodson, Flosky symbolizes “the excesses of Byronism” joined “with the obscurity of transcendental philosophy.”

Peacock played off the public conception of the poets to fashion his characters, who were never intended to reflect biographical fact. This was especially true with the character Scythrop, who, as a seeming alcoholic and parasitic only child, differed vastly from Shelley. The poet took no offense at the characterization, writing to Peacock of his delight with the novel. Accessible and entertaining for fans of both Gothic fiction and romantic poetry, Nightmare Abbey continues to be read and studied as a strong work of satire, and as its author’s best novel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dodson, Charles B. Introduction to Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey, The Misfortunes of Elphin, Crotchet Castle. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, vii–xxviii.