Peacock’s third novel, Nightmare Abbey, represents a return to the pattern of Headlong Hall (1815). His previous novel, Melincourt (1817), also bears the name of a country house but is less focused on a particular place, its peripatetic action unfolding over a virtual Regency landscape. Moreover, Melincourt is the most politically engaged of Peacock’s novels, its reform-minded hero and heroine clearly speaking for Peacock himself. Peacock’s friend, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley — on whom Melincourt’s hero, Sylvan Forester, is said to be based — thought so highly of Melincourt that he recommended it to his father-in-law, the radical philosopher William Godwin. Thus, when Peacock wrote to him in May and September 1818 of a novel-in-progress entitled Nightmare Abbey, Shelley was evidently hoping for something along the same lines as Melincourt, urging his friend...
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Citation: Mulvihill, James. "Nightmare Abbey". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 June 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16900, accessed 14 December 2025.]
