You may as well dine first, and be miserable afterwards.

The last fifteen pages or so of Nightmare Abbey – that title is from Chapter XIV (Peacock’s chapters, like his books, are short) – move away from the dinner table and wine cellar to turn into something rare in the Peacock I have read, a meaningful story, complete with complications and plot twists and a genuine resolution, a comic one, of course, a parody of Gothic and Romantic nonsense.  Much of it involves an argument about an overheard noise (the father believes his son is concealing a woman, while his son is, in fact, concealing a woman) that would not be out of place in Young Frankenstein or an episode of Frasier (“But, sir,” said Scythrop, “a key-hole may be so constructed as to act like an acoustic tube, and an acoustic tube, sir, will modify sound in a very remarkable manner” etc. etc.).

Otherwise, novelistic conventions of plot and story are playthings for Peacock.  In Crotchet Castle, the conventional romantic leads are simply abandoned for an entirely different story.  The characters are all sufficiently unreal that I doubt many readers ever cared – why would I prefer to watch the courtship of these puppets rather than those?  Peacock is not exactly Jane Austen.  Crotchet Castle ends with dancing and the singing of ballads and “[a]n immense bowl of spiced wine, with roasted apples hissing on its surface,…  borne into the hall by four men, followed by an empty bowl of the same dimensions, with all the materials of arrack punch” (Ch. XVIII)  The party, and the novel, too, only ends when the punch bowl is empty.

A true satirist, Peacock has his prejudices and hatreds, but his novels are in the end jolly, friendly places.  He is suspicious of progress, but defends knowledge.  He laughs at manias, but respects ideas.  He prefers over-indulged pleasure to healthy but dry abstention.  He is a happy satirist.  The plashy fens and furry broods of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1937) are spiritual children of the Peacock spirit.

Nightmare Abbey is actually an argument against unhappiness of the Gothic and Romantic variety, against the pose of unhappiness, whether it is found in Wetherism, Byronism, or transcendentalism.  “Let us all be unhappy together,” declares a character, just before he and his companions roar through a drunken rendition of Seamen Three: “And our ballast is old wine; \ And your ballast is old wine.”  I begin to doubt that the misery of these characters is genuine.