Nightmare Abbey

'Readers are provided with all the information they need to understand and evaluate both the texts and the purposes underlying them … the editors have interpreted their brief generously. They have done an excellent job in identifying many 'out-of-the-way sources and analogues', as well as in positioning the texts accurately at a particular nineteenth-century cultural moment … this is likely to become the edition of choice for scholars and enthusiasts of Peacock's novels, and for economists, historians, philosophers and other students of the changing currents of nineteenth-century intellectual culture. The volumes are beautifully produced.' Pamela Clemit, Times Literary Supplement

'… the first two volumes of the Cambridge Edition should become the new standard for editors of the Romantic novel. They not only perform the scholarly work of informing the reader of dates, circumstances, and variants, but they do what the best textual editing can: hugely enrich the experience of reading Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle, and consequently enhance our sense of Peacock's vigour, complexity, and wit.' William Bowers, Keats-Shelley Journal

'… [a] meticulous edition …' Thomas Keymer, London Review of Books

'Nightmare Abbey excels in tracking the composition through Spring 1818 … A variety of sources, including anecdotal evidence, are similarly used to recreate the immediate critical response … offering valuable commentary on prototypes of the novel's satiric figures, generic and personal … In a final section on 'Afterlife', the editor convincingly attributes a shift in fortunes in the popularity of this title to the growth of English literature as an academic subject … a remarkable achievement in elucidating Peacock's 'fine wit' for present and future readers.' Peter Garside, Peacock edition