Nightmare Abbey E-Book

Thomas Love Peacock

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 191

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Nightmare Abbey is a novella by Thomas Love Peacock, first published in 1818, widely considered to be Peacock's most enduringly popular work. The narrative centres on Christopher Glowry, a miserly widower, his son Scythrop and a host of dismal-sounding servants in his family pile, Nightmare Abbey. Recovering from an ill-fated love affair, Scythrop dreams up various schemes to reform and regenerate the human species, but misanthropy lurks around every corner, and everything changes when a mermaid is spotted and a strange woman appears in his chamber. Although fundamentally a Gothic novel, and rich in allusion – from Pope to Dante, Rossini to Mozart – Nightmare Abbey is, at heart, a satire, as Peacock makes clear in the preface to a later edition, in which he describes the characters – allusions to his friends – as 'status-quo-ites', 'morbid visionaries', 'romantic enthusiasts' and 'lovers of good dinners'.

Leseprobe

Nightmare Abbey

thomas love

peacock

renard press

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Nightmare Abbey first published in 1818

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2021

Edited text © Renard Press Ltd, 2021

Notes and Extra Material © Renard Press Ltd, 2021

Cover design by Will DadyExtra Material proofread by Michael Calder

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contents

Preface

Nightmare Abbey

Chapter I

Chapter Ii

Chapter Iii

Chapter Iv

Chapter V

Chapter Vi

Chapter Vii

Chapter Viii

Chapter Ix

Chapter X

Chapter Xi

Chapter Xii

Chapter Xiii

Chapter Xiv

Chapter Xv

Notes

Extra Material

preface

from the 1837 edition

All these little publications*appeared originally without prefaces. I left them to speak for themselves; and I thought I might very fitly preserve my own impersonality, having never intruded on the personality of others, nor taken any liberties but with public conduct and public opinions. But an old friend assures me that to publish a book without a preface is like entering a drawing room without making a bow. In deference to this opinion, though I am not quite clear of its soundness, I make my prefatory bow at this eleventh hour.

Headlong Hall was written in 1815; Nightmare Abbey in 1817; Maid Marian, with the exception of the last three chapters, in 1818; Crotchet Castle in 1830. I am desirous to note the intervals because, at each of these periods, things were true, in great matters and in small, which are true no longer. Headlong Hall begins with the Holyhead Mail, and Crotchet Castle ends with a rotten borough. The Holyhead Mail no longer keeps the same hours, nor stops at the Capel Cerig Inn, which the progress of improvement has thrown out of the road; and the rotten boroughs of 1830 have ceased to exist, though there are some very pretty pocket properties, which are their worthy successors. But the classes of tastes, feelings and opinions, which were successively brought into play in these little tales, remain substantially the same. Perfectibilians, deteriorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque and lovers of good dinners march, and will march for ever, pari passu1with the march of mechanics, which some facetiously call the march of intellect. The fastidious in old wine are a race that does not decay. Literary violators of the confidences of private life still gain a disreputable livelihood and an unenviable notoriety. Matchmakers from interest and the disappointed in love and in friendship are varieties of which specimens are extant. The great principle of the Right of Might is as flourishing now as in the days of Maid Marian; the array of false pretensions, moral, political and literary is as imposing as ever; the rulers of the world still feel things in their effects, and never foresee them in their causes; and political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums and practise legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude; following, like the ‘learned friend’ of Crotchet Castle, a course as tortuous as that of a river, but in a reverse process, beginning by being dark and deep, and ending by being transparent.

thomas love peacock

4th March 1837

1pari passu: ‘At the same rate’ (Latin).

nightmare abbey

There’s a dark lantern of the spirit,Which none see by but those who bear it,That makes them in the dark see visionsAnd hag themselves with apparitions,Find racks for their own minds, and vauntOf their own misery and want.

butler*

matthew: Oh! it’s your only fine humour, sir. Your true melancholy breeds your perfect fine wit, sir. I am melancholy myself, divers times, sir; and then do I no more but take pen and paper presently, and overflow you half a score or a dozen of sonnets at a sitting.

stephen: Truly, sir, and I love such things out of measure.

matthew: Why, I pray you, sir, make use of my study: it’s at your service.

stephen: I thank you, sir; I shall be bold, I warrant you. Have you a stool there to be melancholy upon?

ben jonson, Every Man in His Humour, Act iii, Scene 1

Ay esleu gazouiller et siffler oye, comme dit le commun proverbe, entre les cygnes, plutoust que d’estre entre tant de gentils poëtes et faconds orateurs mut du tout estimé.

rabelais, Prol. L. 5*

chapter i

Nightmare abbey,a venerable family mansion, in a highly picturesque state of semi-dilapidation, pleasantly situated on a strip of dry land between the sea and the fens, at the verge of the county of Lincoln, had the honour to be the seat of Christopher Glowry, Esquire. This gentleman was naturally of an atrabilarious temperament, and much troubled with those phantoms of indigestion which are commonly called ‘blue devils’.* He had been deceived in an early friendship: he had been crossed in love; and had offered his hand, from pique, to a lady, who accepted it from interest, and who, in so doing, violently tore asunder the bonds of a tried and youthful attachment. Her vanity was gratified by being the mistress of a very extensive, if not very lively, establishment; but all the springs of her sympathies were frozen. Riches she possessed, but that which enriches them – the participation of affection – was wanting. All that they could purchase for her became indifferent to her, because that which they could not purchase, and which was more valuable than themselves, she had, for their sake, thrown away. She discovered, when it was too late, that she had mistaken the means for the end – that riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness. In this wilful blight of her affections, she found them valueless as means: they had been the end to which she had immolated all her affections, and were now the only end that remained to her. She did not confess this to herself as a principle of action, but it operated through the medium of unconscious self-deception, and terminated in inveterate avarice. She laid on external things the blame of her mind’s internal disorder, and thus became by degrees an accomplished scold. She often went her daily rounds through a series of deserted apartments, every creature in the house vanishing at the creak of her shoe, much more at the sound of her voice, to which the nature of things affords no simile; for, as far as the voice of woman, when attuned by gentleness and love, transcends all other sounds in harmony, so far does it surpass all others in discord when stretched into unnatural shrillness by anger and impatience.

Mr Glowry used to say that his house was no better than a spacious kennel, for everyone in it led the life of a dog. Disappointed both in love and in friendship, and looking upon human learning as vanity, he had come to a conclusion that there was but one good thing in the world, videlicet2 a good dinner, and this his parsimonious lady seldom suffered him to enjoy; but, one morning, like Sir Leoline in Christabel, ‘he woke and found his lady dead,’* and remained a very consolate widower, with one small child.

This only son and heir Mr Glowry had christened Scythrop,* from the name of a maternal ancestor who had hanged himself one rainy day in a fit of taedium vitae3 and had been eulogised by a coroner’s jury in the comprehensive phrase of felo de se;4 on which account, Mr Glowry held his memory in high honour, and made a punchbowl of his skull.

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 high 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.

His fellow students, however, who drove tandem and random in great perfection and were connoisseurs in good inns, had taught him to drink deep ere he departed. He had passed much of his time with these choice spirits, and had seen the rays of the midnight lamp tremble on many a lengthening file of empty bottles. He passed his vacations sometimes at Nightmare Abbey, sometimes in London, at the house of his uncle, Mr Hilary, a very cheerful and elastic gentleman who had married the sisterof the melancholy Mr Glowry. The company that frequented his house was the gayest of the gay. Scythrop danced with the ladies and drank with the gentlemen, and was pronounced by both a very accomplished charming fellow and an honour to the university.

At the house of Mr Hilary, Scythrop first saw the beautiful Miss Emily Girouette. He fell in love, which is nothing new. He was favourably received, which is nothing strange. Mr Glowry and Mr Girouette had a meeting on the occasion, and quarrelled about the terms of the bargain, which is neither new nor strange. The lovers were torn asunder, weeping and vowing everlasting constancy, and, in three weeks after this tragical event, the lady was led a smiling bride to the altar by the Honourable Mr Lackwit, which is neither strange nor new.

Scythrop received this intelligence at Nightmare Abbey, and was half distracted on the occasion. It was his first disappointment, and preyed deeply on his sensitive spirit. His father, to comfort him, read him a commentary on Ecclesiastes, which he had himself composed, and which demonstrated incontrovertibly that all is vanity. He insisted particularly on the text, ‘One man among a thousand have I found, but a woman amongst all those have I not found.’

‘How could he expect it,’ said Scythrop, ‘when the whole thousand were locked up in his seraglio?* His experience is no precedent for a free state of society like that in which we live.’

‘Locked up or at large,’ said Mr Glowry, ‘the result is the same: their minds are always locked up, and vanity and interest keep the key. I speak feelingly, Scythrop.’

‘I am sorry for it, sir,’ said Scythrop. ‘But how is it that their minds are locked up? The fault is in their artificial education, which studiously models them into mere musical dolls, to be set out for sale in the great toy shop of society.’

‘To be sure,’ said Mr Glowry, ‘their education is not so well finished as yours has been; and your idea of a musical doll is good. I bought one myself, but it was confoundedly out of tune; but, whatever be the cause, Scythrop, the effect is certainly this: that one is pretty nearly as good as another, as far as any judgement can be formed of them before marriage. It is only after marriage that they show their true qualities, as I know by bitter experience. Marriage is, therefore, a lottery, and the less choice and selection a man bestows on his ticket the better; for, if he has incurred considerable pains and expense to obtain a lucky number, and his lucky number proves a blank, he experiences not a simple but a complicated disappointment; the loss of labour and money being superadded to the disappointment of drawing a blank, which, constituting simply and entirely the grievance of him who has chosen his ticket at random, is, from its simplicity, the more endurable.’ This very excellent reasoning was thrown away upon Scythrop, who retired to his tower as dismal and disconsolate as before.

The tower which Scythrop inhabited stood at the south-eastern angle of the abbey; and, on the southern side, the foot of the tower opened on a terrace, which was called ‘the garden’, though nothing grew on it but ivy and a few amphibious weeds. The south-western tower, which was ruinous and full of owls, might, with equal propriety, have been called ‘the aviary’. This terrace, or garden, or terrace-garden, or garden-terrace (the reader may name it ad libitum),5 took in an oblique view of the open sea, and fronted a long tract of level sea coast and a fine monotony of fens and windmills.

The reader will judge from what we have said that this building was a sort of castellated abbey; and it will probably occur to him to enquire if it had been one of the strongholds of the ancient church militant. Whether this was the case, or how far it had been indebted to the taste of Mr Glowry’s ancestors for any transmutations from its original state are, unfortunately, circumstances not within the pale of our knowledge.

The north-western tower contained the apartments of Mr Glowry. The moat at its base and the fens beyond comprised the whole of his prospect. This moat surrounded the abbey, and was in immediate contact with the walls on every side but the south.

The north-eastern tower was appropriated to the domestics, whom Mr Glowry always chose by one of two criterions – a long face or a dismal name. His butler was Raven; his steward was Crow; his valet was Skellet. Mr Glowry maintained that the valet was of French extraction, and that his name was Squelette.6 His grooms were Mattocks and Graves. On one occasion, being in want of a footman, he received a letter from a person signing himself Diggory Deathshead, and lost no time in securing this acquisition; but on Diggory’s arrival, Mr Glowry was horror-struck by the sight of a round, ruddy face and a pair of laughing eyes. Deathshead was always grinning – not a ghastly smile, but the grin of a comic mask – and disturbed the echoes of the hall with so much unhallowed laughter that Mr Glowry gave him his discharge. Diggory, however, had stayed long enough to make conquests of all the old gentleman’s maids, and left him a flourishing colony of young Deathsheads to join chorus with the owls that had before been the exclusive choristers of Nightmare Abbey.

The main body of the building was divided into rooms of state, spacious apartments for feasting and numerous bedrooms for visitors, who, however, were few and far between.

Family interests compelled Mr Glowry to receive occasional visits from Mr and Mrs Hilary, who paid them from the same motive; and, as the lively gentleman on these occasions found few conductors for his exuberant gaiety, he became like a double-charged electric jar, which often exploded in some burst of outrageous merriment to the signal discomposure of Mr Glowry’s nerves.

Another occasional visitor, much more to Mr Glowry’s taste, was Mr Flosky,* a very lachrymose and morbid gentleman, of some note in the literary world, but in his own estimation of much more merit than name. The part of his character which recommended him to Mr Glowrywas his very fine sense of the grim and the tearful.* No one could relate a dismal story with so many minutiae of supererogatory wretchedness. No one could call up a Rawhead and Bloodybones* with so many adjuncts and circumstances of ghastliness. Mystery was his mental element. He lived in the midst of that visionary world in which nothing is but what is not. He dreamed with his eyes open, and saw ghosts dancing round him at noontide. He had been in his youth an enthusiast for liberty, and had hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery, and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth. Because all this was not done, he deduced that nothing was done; and from this deduction, according to his system of logic, he drew a conclusion that worse than nothing was done; that the overthrow of the feudal fortresses of tyranny and superstition was the greatest calamity that had ever befallen mankind; and that their only hope now was to rake the rubbish together, and rebuild it without any of those loopholes by which the light had originally crept in. To qualify himself for a coadjutor in this laudable task, he plunged into the central opacity of Kantian* metaphysics, and lay perdu7 several years in transcendental darkness till the common daylight of common sense became intolerable to his eyes. He called the sun an ignis fatuus,8 and exhorted all who would listen to his friendly voice – which were about as many as called ‘God save King Richard’* – to shelter themselves from its delusive radiance in the obscure haunt of Old Philosophy. This word, ‘old’, had great charms for him. ‘The good old times’ were always on his lips – meaning the days when polemic theology was in its prime, and rival prelates beat the drum ecclesiastic* with Herculean vigour till the one wound up his series of syllogisms with the very orthodox conclusion of roasting the other.

But the dearest friend of Mr Glowry, and his most welcome guest, was Mr Toobad, the Manichaean Millenarian.* The twelfth verse of the twelfth chapter of Revelations was always in his mouth: ‘Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the Devil is come among you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.’ He maintained that the supreme dominion of the world was, for wise purposes, given over for a while to the Evil Principle; and that this precise period of time, commonly called the enlightened age, was the point of his plenitude of power. He used to add that by and by he would be cast down, and a high and happy order of things succeed; but he never omitted the saving clause, ‘not in our time’, which last words were always echoed in doleful response by the sympathetic Mr Glowry.

Another and very frequent visitor was the Reverend Mr Larynx, the vicar of Claydyke, a village about ten miles distant – a good-natured accommodating divine, who was always most obligingly ready to take a dinner and a bed at the house of any country gentleman in distress for a companion. Nothing came amiss to him – a game at billiards, at chess, at draughts, at backgammon, at piquet,9 or at all-fours in a tête-à-tête, or any game on the cards, round, square or triangular, in a party of any number exceeding two. He would even dance among friends, rather than that a lady, even if she were on the wrong side of thirty, should sit still for want of a partner. For a ride, a walk or a sail in the morning, a song after dinner, a ghost story after supper, a bottle of port with the squire or a cup of green tea with his lady – for all or any of these, or for anything else that was agreeable to anyone else, consistently with the dye of his coat, the Reverend Mr Larynx was at all times equally ready. When at Nightmare Abbey, he would condole with Mr Glowry, drink Madeira with Scythrop, crack jokes with Mr Hilary, hand Mrs Hilary to the piano, take charge of her fan and gloves and turn over her music with surprising dexterity, quote Revelations with Mr Toobad and lament the good old times of feudal darkness with the transcendental Mr Flosky.

2videlicet: ‘Namely’ (Latin; more usually seen as ‘viz’).

3taedium vitae: Literally, ‘tired of life’ (Latin), world-weariness.

4felo de se: Suicide (Anglo-Latin).

5ad libitum: ‘At pleasure’ (Latin).

6Squelette: ‘Skeleton’ (French).

7perdu: ‘Lost’ (French).

8ignis fatuus: Literally, ‘foolish fire’ (Latin); another name for a will-o’-the-wisp.

9piquet: A card game.

chapter ii

Shortly after the disastrous termination of Scythrop’s passion for Miss Emily Girouette, Mr Glowry found himself, much against his will, involved in a lawsuit, which compelled him to dance attendance on the High Court of Chancery.* Scythrop was left alone at Nightmare Abbey. He was a burnt child, and dreaded the fire of female eyes. He wandered about the ample pile, or along the garden-terrace, with ‘his cogitative faculties immersed in cogibundity of cogitation’.* The terrace terminated at the south-western tower, which, as we have said, was ruinous and full of owls. Here would Scythrop take his evening seat, on a fallen fragment of mossy stone, with his back resting against the ruined wall, a thick canopy of ivy with an owl in it over his head and The Sorrows of Young Werther*in his hand. He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical if disappointment in love and total solitude had not conspired to bring on a relapse. He began to devour romances and German tragedies, and, by the recommendation of Mr Flosky, to pore over ponderous tomes of transcendental philosophy, which reconciled him to the labour of studying them by their mystical jargon and necromantic imagery. In the congenial solitude of NightmareAbbey, the distempered ideas of metaphysicalromance and romantic metaphysics had ample time and space to germinate into a fertile crop of chimeras, which rapidly shot up into vigorous and abundant vegetation.

He now became troubled with the passion for reforming the world.* He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he intended to institute a perfect republic