Crotchet Castle

The first fully comprehensive scholarly edition of Thomas Love Peacock's sixth novel, Crotchet Castle (1831).

Thomas Love Peacock (Author), Freya Johnston (Edited by), Matthew Bevis (Edited by)

9781107030725, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 December 2016

442 pages, 2 b/w illus.
22.3 x 14.5 x 2.9 cm, 0.66 kg

'The Introduction to Crotchet Castle … explores the composition and publication history in great detail, exploiting … surviving draft materials to … the immediacy of Peacock's response to unfolding events...a remarkable achievement in elucidating Peacock's 'fine wit' for present and future readers.' Peter Garside, Peacock edition

Thomas Love Peacock (1785?1866) is one of the most distinctive prose satirists of the Romantic period. The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock offers the first complete text of his novels to appear for more than half a century. Crotchet Castle (1831), his sixth novel, contains all the humour and social satire for which Peacock is famous. Its lively farce is more ambitious than that of the earlier works in its range of cultural and intellectual targets, including progressivism, dogmatism, liberalism, sexism, mass education and the idiocies of the learned. The book constitutes an artistic, political and philosophical miscellany of sorts, thematically unified in its satirical emphasis on folly and dispute – and on the folly of dispute itself. This edition provides a full introduction, chronology, annotations and detailed textual and scholarly apparatus.

General editor's preface
Chronology
Introduction
Crotchet Castle
Appendix A. Peacock's Preface of 1837
Appendix B. Holograph fragment of Chapter 4 (c.1830)
Appendix C. Holograph fragment of Chapter 5 (c.1830)
Appendix D. Holograph manuscript of 'Touchandgo' (watermark 1827)
Appendix E. Holograph manuscript of 'Touchandgo' (watermark 1828)
Appendix F. Holograph fragment of Chapter 16 (c.1830)
Appendix G. 'The Fate of a Broom: An Anticipation' (1831, 1837)
Note on the text
List of emendations and variants
Ambiguous line-end hyphenations
Explanatory notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Classic fiction [pre c 1945 FC], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]