Books Reminiscent of Thomas Love Peacock

   Scythrop Glowry on Aug 15 17:29:36

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Few people know of Thomas Love Peacock, but I talk about him so much that if you're in this group you ought to know him...and if you know Crotchet Castle and Nightmare Abbey you'll be hungering for more. This admirable satirist wrote, unfortunately, only seven novels, so this list is quite necessary. I haven't many things to put on it yet, but, like the previous two posts of this sort, it's a work in progress.

Love and Freindship (179?)

by Jane Austen (from Juvenilia vol. II)

Remember Nightmare Abbey? That was a satire on gothic romances. This is a parody of novels written around the same time (I'm not sure whether they were gothic or not). How I laughed and laughed over this little sweetmeat of Peacockesque humor that predates Peacock.

Free Love and Freindship pdf at Google Books

The Heroine or The Adventures of Cherubina (1813~14?)

by Eaton Standard Barret

This is one of the best books I've ever read. Page-turning adventure, breath-taking hilariousness, and a rather sensible love story into the bargain. It's not realistic, but it's not suppose to be...any more than a Thomas Love Peacock book.

Free Cherubina pdf at Google Books

Her Majesty the King: a Romance of the Harem (1898)

by James Jeffery Roche

I suppose if The Napoleon of Notting Hill belongs on this list Her Majesty the King does too. It's not nearly so naughty as it sounds. Like a Thomas Love Peacock novel it is short, grandiloquent, satirical (it is making fun of Western civilization although it is set among pashas and sultans), so purposefully silly that you have to enjoy its absurdities, and following a plot that is subservient to the humor. "The great Pasha Muley Mustapha" is far more like an American man, his wife is the archatype of a domineering American woman, and Soothsayer Shacabac spouts the exstreme of selfish self-help advice...but Roche does not stop there. He can't resist adding an actual American outlaw.

Free Her Majesty the King pdf at Google Books

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

by G.K. Chesterton

This is a very unique book. Taking place 80 years after it was written, it shows a little changed London where people have learned that revolutions are foolish. Kings are chosen randomly and have despotic control...what happens when Auberon Quin, a man who cares for nothing but a joke, comes to fill this place? And what, too, if Mr. Chainmail were to start a revolution?

Free The Napoleon of Notting Hill pdf

Tags: literature Thomas Love Peacock