Crotchet Castle

by Thomas Love Peacock

Mr. Crotchet found it essential to furnish himself with a coat of arms, videlicet: Crest, a crotchet rampant, in A sharp: Arms, three empty bladders, turgescent, to show how opinions are formed; three bags of gold, pendent, to show why they are maintained; three naked swords, trenchant, to show how they are administered; and three barbers' blocks, gaspant, to show how they are swallowed.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Gothic, British Literature, 19th Century, Humor

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1831

About the author

Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) was an English novelist and poet. For most of his life, Peacock worked for the East India Co. He was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who greatly inspired his writing. His best verse is interspersed in his novels, which are dominated by the conversations of their characters and satirize the intellectual currents of the day. His best-known work, Nightmare Abbey (1818), satirizes romantic melancholy and includes characters based on Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron.

Reviews

[Petra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was delightful! A humorous surprise of a read.
Gothic??!! Not in my eyes. This story is full of wonderfully eccentric characters, each with a singular obsession that they never tire of talking about. My favorites: Mr. Dampfire, who's afraid of water & malaria, and Mr. Chainmail, who thinks that the world has gone down-hill since the 12th Century.
In between the humorous discussions between the characters are stories of love, wealth, greed, deception and plenty of food and drink.....wine and champagne for all! :D
I had no expectations or knowledge of this book when going in and it entertained me throughout. A surprising find.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed this Georgian satire though I didn't think it was as funny as Peacock's more famous novel "Nightmare Abbey". However, Peacock's style will not be for everyone & I can easily imagine that some readers would find this deadly dull. Personally I find it would be worth reading his books just for the fun of the characters' names - Mr. Mac Quedy (get it - Q.E.D. - ha ha), Mr. Touchandgo (the absconding banker), the Earl of Foolincourt, Mr. Wilful Wontsee, etc. etc.

Read in my hardcover omnibus "The Pleasures of Peacock"

[Andrew H · Rating 3 out of 5]

This sixth novel has its moments, but the format is so much like Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey that the jokes are thin. Much like the film that has a sequel, then a prequel, or the novel franchise that runs far too long, Crotchet Castle is one step too far down a well-trodden path.

[Yngvild · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crotchet Castle is good-natured satire, droll rather than polemical. As far as there is any story, a nouveau riche merchant is trying to polish his social status by turning his house, grandly named Crotchet Castle, into a salon for intellectuals. The result is a series of breakfasts, dinners and travels, during which the guests promote their own views or specialties, while denigrating everybody else’s.

The discussions are even-handed: the economist (Scottish, of course) wants to reduce everything to numbers and logic; the transcendental poet worships the “sublime Kant”; the clergyman, the main speaker, cares mostly for his dinner and pooh-poohs the economist’s ideas of progress in society.

And as for the human mind, I deny that it is the same in all men. I hold that there is every variety of natural capacity from the idiot to Newton and Shakespeare; the mass of mankind, midway between these extremes, being blockheads of different degrees; education leaving them pretty nearly as it found them, with this single difference, that it gives a fixed direction to their stupidity, a sort of incurable wry neck to the thing they call their understanding. So one nose points always east, and another always west, and each is ready to swear that it points due north.

Thomas Love Peacock is a reader’s writer. His novels assume knowledge of classical Latin and Greek literature; they are full of quotations from French, Latin, ancient Greek and Italian; and he uses unusual words with a schoolboy’s glee. This is the clergyman’s retort to the meteorologist, who is obsessed with the 19th century equivalent of global warming.

For my part I care not a rush (or any other aquatic and inesculent vegetable) who or what sucks up either the water or the infection. I think the proximity of wine a matter of much more importance than the longinquity of water. – Crotchet Castle, Thomas Love Peacock (1831)

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

My second Peacock and if it's as darkly funny as Nightmare Abbey I will be best pleased.

In one of those beautiful vallies, through which the Thames (not yet polluted by the tide, the scouring of cities, or even the minor defilement of the sandy streams of Surrey,) rolls a clear flood through flowery meadows, under the shade of the old beech woods, and the smooth mossy greensward of the chalk hills (which pour into it their tributary rivulets, as pure and pellucid as the fountain of Bandusium, or the wells of Scamander, by which the wives and daughters of the Trojans washed their splendid garments in the days of peace, before the coming of the Greeks); in one of those beautiful vallies, on a bold round surfaced lawn, spotted wood, which rose with a steep, but not precipitous ascent, from the river to the summit of the hill, stood the castellated villa of a retired citizen.

That! - dear friends - is just one sentence. lol

It's panning out in the same mould as Nightmare Abbey - various characters(best summarised by their names, an affectation later used by Dickens) sit around a dining table arguing the toss. It's very funny, and if one should feel inclined to quote all those funny lines for your delectation, one would be copying out most of the book. There is a love match at the root of it all and it is, overall, a funny and charming book - bit I much preferred the dark skit on romanticiam that was Nightmare Abbey.

[The Usual · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK, it seems I share a sense of humour with someone who’s been dead since 1866. That’s… different. Not bad different, just different, and an indication I need to drag myself into the twenty-first century. All I can say is that this book tickled me. Whether it would have tickled me twenty years ago, with a bit less reading under my belt and a bit less knowledge of the period, is another matter.

What we have here is, well, a Thomas Love Peacock novel. You know the score: there’s no real character development, good-humoured fun is poked at a range of subjects, there are slightly more characters present than can really be justified, and the plot, what there is of one, is something stuck in when the author remembers.

Is that bad? No, not really. If the chap were alive today he’d be doing stand-up.

[Dch3jac1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amusing read. A bit heavy going in parts. Some new words - asseverated or acatalectic anyone - that'll probably not be popping up in conversation.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of chuckles, and enjoyed the 19th c archaisms and style.

Notes:
Read an 1891 edition, published by J. M. Dent & Co at Aldine House, London. 192 deckled pages
7 ... Introduction (writer unknown): Peacock at his zenith. ... equally free from the errors of immaturity and the infirmities of senescence.
8 ... merry imps
10 ... ardent and pure thirst for knowledge
16 ... Should once the world resolve to abolish / All that's ridiculous & foolish, / It would have nothing left to do, / To apply in jest or earnest to. --Butler
18 ... Ebeneezer MacCrotchet ... fear of losing predominated over the sacred thirst of paper money
19 ... he was desirous to obliterate alike the Hebrew and Caledonian vestiges in his name. [Reading copy had MacGregor Jenkins' ex libris, 1892.]
20 ... Mr. Crotchet found it essential to furnish himself with a coat of arms, videlicet: Crest, a crotchet rampant, in A sharp: Arms, three empty bladders, turgescent, to show how opinions are formed; three bags of gold, pendent, to show why they are maintained; three naked swords, trenchant, to show how they are administered; and three barbers' blocks, gaspant, to show how they are swallowed.
36 ... I think the proximity of wine a matter of much more importance than the longinquity of water. You are here within a mile of the Thames; but in the cellar of my friend, Mr. Crotchet, there is the talismanic antidote of a thousand dozen of old wine; a beautiful spectacle, I assure you, and a model of arrangement.
78 ... Crotchet: Pray gents ... pocket your manuscripts; fill your glasses; and consider what we shall do with our money
Mr. Firedamp: Drain the country and get rid of malaria, by abolishing duck ponds.
83 ... The schemes for the world's regeneration evaporated in a tumult of voices
89 ... a gentleman's house: there's nothing more fit to be looked at than the outside of a book
92 ... ... if I wished my footman to learn modesty, I should not dream of sending him to school to a naked Venus
104 ... At Oxford's undisturbed libraries, Rev Folliott laid a wager with Crotchet "that in all their perlustrations they would not find a man reading," and won it. ... We may well ask, in these great reservoirs of books whereof no man ever draws a sluice .... What is done here for the classics?
151 ... he awoke, the next morning, to the pleasant consciousness that he was under the same roof with one of the most fascinating creatures under the canopy of heaven.
192 ... Turnbull and Spears, Printers, Edinburgh

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

My favourite character in this was Mr Firedamp. I'm pretty sure I'd happily read a whole story about him and his irrational fear of water and catching malaria everywhere he goes. Mr Chainmail was a fun guy too, with his weird love for the twelfth century. If there's anything to say about this story, it's that it had unique characters.

It was an okay read, but didn't pull me in too much, so, two stars from me.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each chapter in this is well-written (incredibly well-written in fact) and a delight to write--if read serially, comic portraits, caricatures of Nineteenth Century types.... but as a whole it doesn't really hold up.....

There's not really a plot....

... but boy can this guy write...

... and we can see how he influenced British humor of recent days.....

[Wreade1872 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A funny social satire story. A surprisingly easy read despite having to look up a lot of words.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful book 'of it's age', with many chuckle out loud moments as Trevor Love Peacock wryly observes the eccentricities and hypocrisies of a group of mainly well-to-do people, feasting, whilst debating philosophical issues of the day. I could not really follow the story as such, but the characters , with their odd names and passions are so well drawn and described with a Jane Austen style irony. A joy.

[Elaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Almost as hilarious as Nightmare Abbey - but not quite.

[Scull17 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 ☆

[Chris Marquette · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was nothing original in this novel, it was hardly a novel, and it wasn't very funny (though it was clearly meant to be).

[Lynda Newman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very wordy, not much of a story.

[Mauricio]

Enternaining