Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novels are wicked parodies. Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey are comic Platonic Symposia where characters who are either representative types or thinly veiled caricatures of Peacock's contemporaries gather in country houses to eat, drink and discuss. Peacock pokes fun at contemporary attitudes and ideas, but it is genial stuff. In Nightmare Abbey he caricatures his close friend Shelley along with Byron and Coleridge as he derides the Romantic literary movement in its various aspects. Peacock's very evident relish of the absurdities he exposes conveys a powerful sense of energy and a joviality that is irresistable.

Headlong Hall was the first of the series of "conversational"novels. The Welsh country house of Squire Headlong is the venue where characters such as Mr. Foster the optimist, Mr. Escot the pessimist,Mr. Jenkinson the status quo-ite, Dr. Cranium thephrenologist,Dr. Gaster, a gluttonous cleric who has written a learned treatise on the art of stuffing a turkey, Mr. Milestone the landscape gardener and many others with many a suitably named and marriageable daughter, assemble to eat, drink and discuss the arts. The central discussion addresses the question of civilisation and progress and involves an inevitable clash of philosophies between the optimism of Godwin and the pessimism of Malthus. Hilarious comic episodes (such as when Milestone, a caricature of Repton, blows up a hilly area in the grounds to acheive a fashionable smoothness with near disastrous consequences) form a romantic sub-plot which culminates in the arrangement of four marriages.

HEADLONG HALL

THE MAIL

THE SQUIRE-THE BREAKFAST

THE ARRIVALS

THE GROUNDS

THE DINNER

THE EVENING

THE WALK

THE TOWER

THE SEXTON

THE SKULL

THE ANNIVERSARY

THE LECTURE

THE BALL

THE PROPOSALS

THE CONCLUSION

NIGHTMARE ABBEY