Nightmare Abbey & Crotchet Castle (Penguin Classics)

Thomas Love Peacock was born in Weymouth in 1785, the son of a London merchant. His schooling ended before he was thirteen and he became a clerk in a City office in London while beginning a close study of French, Italian and English literature. He also published several volumes of minor poetry through which he made the acquaintance of Shelley, who was a close friend from 1812 until his death in 1822. Peacock wrote his first novel, Headlong Hall , in 1815, starting the series of seven satirical novels on which his fame rests. Melincourt and Nightmare Abbey , a satire on ‘black romanticism’, followed in 1817 and 1818. In 1820 he married Jane Gryffydh and also wrote The Four Ages of Poetry , which baited Shelley to reply with his classic Defense of Poetry . Further novels, Maid Marion (1822), The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), Crochet Castle (1831), a satire on political economy and the ideas of James Mill and Bentham, followed, but he was desperately grief-stricken by the death of his mother in 1833 and for the next twenty-five years wrote almost nothing, working with great diligence for the East India Company as an excellent administrator. His Memoirs of Shelley were published in 1858-62 and his last novel, Gryll Grange , in 1860. He retired in 1856 and lived as a recluse until his death in 1866.

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