Thomas Love Peacock eBooks
eBooks di Thomas Love Peacock editi da Forgotten Books
Maid Marian and Crotchet Castle. E-book. Formato PDF Thomas Love Peacock - Forgotten Books, 2017 -
During many years' reading, with ever fresh enjoyment, of Peacock's novels, I had until quite the other day - indeed until a time later than that at which I undertook the pleasant duty of writing this preface - been unable to understand what special model the author had had before him in these unique performances. Lord Houghton had noticed, and nobody who had any knowledge of the subject was likely to gainsay, the obvious indebtedness of Peacock to the French tale-tellers of the eighteenth century from Anthony Hamilton to Pigault-Lebrun - though, by the way, Lord Houghton's attribution of the Compere Mathieu to Pigault-Lebrun was a mistake, or more probably a slip of memory. But in the model which Hamilton set, which Voltaire borrowed, and which others imitated from Voltaire, there was a very great deal which is quite different from Peacock - different not merely in the details (where difference was necessary, considering the time and country of the writers), but in other ways much more important. I had not solved the problem when, some nine years since, I first wrote about Peacock in Macmillan's Magazine, and I have not noticed that anybody has ever solved it.
Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey. E-book. Formato PDF Thomas Love Peacock - Forgotten Books, 2017 -
In the two stories which this volume contains, but especially in the first, the reader will find Peacocks peculiar art and style in a more rudimentary condition than in either of the pieces which preceded them - in a condition, indeed, which may seem almost impossibly rudimentary when they are compared with Crotchet Castle. But there is nothing surprising in this, and in that historic view which adds even more to the enjoyment than it does to the education of reading, it is a positive gain. When Peacock wrote Crotchet Castle he was a man of forty-five, who had for the last ten years seen a great deal of affairs, and something - about as much as he ever cared to see - of society. When fourteen years earlier he wrote Headlong Hall, though he was not an exceedingly young man, he had lived a very retired life, had had few of the usual advantages of education, and had latterly consorted with a society in which talent was indeed abundant, and genius not rare, but which included hardly any but such as Mr. Pope, fresh from my 'St. John,' and Lady Mary, was good enough to designate as 'poetical men.'
Melincourt: Or Sir Oran Haut-Ton. E-book. Formato PDF Thomas Love Peacock - Forgotten Books, 2017 -
Melincourtis usually considered the least interesting of Peacock's novels; and in the strictly comparative sense that is to say that it is the least interesting of a group, every one of which has peculiar and exceptional interest — the statement is no doubt true. The defects of the book are very obvious, and exceedingly easy to account for. [jami long Hall had been very popular; and it was only in the course of nature that the author should repeat his successful experiment. But Head'long Hall had been by no means free from faults; and it certainly was not out of the course of nature that they should reappear in the new venture. In the very noteworthy introduction which the author wrote nearly forty years later, and which contains the promise of Gryll Grange as supplement to complete the satire, it is not unimportant to observe that he pays no attention to any thing but the satirical purport. A man of seventy, satiated with business and not specially hungering after popularity, was not perhaps very likely to discuss his own novels in detail, even to the extent to which Scott and other persons of irreproachable taste have discussed theirs in separate or collected editions. But it is not extravagant to take his silence as a kind of indication of his point of View.