Nightmare Abbey

London: Folio Society, 1994. Hardcover. Fine/Very Good with Slip Case. Forster, Peter. 125 pp. Book is clean with a square, tight binding and bright, white pages. It has the feel of a never-been-read book. The slipcase is also clean and solid with no tears or stains, but does have some minor scuffing that is difficult to see in the scans. "Peacock's seven novels, better called satires or conversations, are among the most pleasurable books in existence. Pleasure is their topic: ease, health, leisure, walking, fine weather, company, talk and ideas. Much of the talk takes place at a table, accompanied by superb food and drink - pleasures enjoyed in real life by a man of classical tastes and a remarkable digestion. The characters are typically guests in a country house, a feature echoed in P. G. Wodehouse's English comic novels. Wodehouse revives Peacock: so does George Meredith, Peacock's son-in-law, Oscar Wilde, as a writer of high comedy, George Bernard Shaw, the early Aldous Huxley (especially in Chrome Yellow), Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Tom Stoppard in Arcadia, which indeed mysteriously hints that Peacock is somehow the mediator or source of the play's Romantic-period scenes.