Three Novels - Headlong Hall -Nightmare Abbey-Crotchet Castle

The witty, erudite, quirky Peacock, renowned for his range of knowledge, was largely self-educated. While working at the East India Company as a clerk to support his invalid wife and children, he mastered Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Welsh. In a series of novels written over a long creative life (he died at age 81), with titles caricaturing the fashion for castles and abbeys---Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), Nightmare Abbey (1818), Crotchet Castle (1831), and Gryll Grange (1861), Peacock tried to show that the proper function of literature, as he said in Nightmare Abbey, was "to reconcile man as he is to the world as it is." Peacock died at Lower Halliford, on January 23, 1866, from injuries sustained in a fire in which he had attempted to save his library, and is buried in the new cemetery at Shepperton