Nightmare Abbey is a novel about people who mistake the performance of an idea for the idea itself. Scythrop Glowry intends to reform humanity. Mr Flosky has elevated obscurity into a philosophical method. Mr Cypress has decided that misery is a personality and taken it on tour. Each of them is entirely sincere. That is, of course, the point.

What Peacock does — and what makes the novel still work after two hundred years — is refuse to mock any of them. He gives each position exactly what it asks for: the atmosphere of intellectual seriousness, the right audience, the proper occasion. And then he waits. The positions expand. The rhetoric builds. And in expanding, they reveal what was always underneath: the performance, the scaffolding, the gap between the grandeur of the position and the ordinariness of the person occupying it.

The instinct, reading it, is to think: I have met these people. Which is followed, if you are paying attention, by the less comfortable thought: I have been these people. The novel is funny in the way that very precise things are funny — not because it exaggerates but because it doesn’t.

Down here, I find I have less patience with grand pronouncements than I used to. Whether this represents growth or merely exhaustion, I cannot say.

— G. H. Schreiber

01/03/2026