MCMX

Table of Contents

Peacock, Thomas love
  Headlong Hall
  Nightmare Abbey

Porter, Jane
  Scottish Chiefs

Pushkin
  The Captain’s Daughter

Rabelais
  Gargantua and Pantagruel

Reade, Charles
  Hard Cash
  Never Too Late to Mend
  The Cloister and the Hearth

Richardson, Samuel
  Pamela
  Clarissa Harlowe
  Sir Charles Grandison

Richter, Jean Paul
  Hesperus
  Titan

Rosegger, Peter
  Papers of the Forest Schoolmaster

Rousseau, Jean Jacques
  New Heloise

Saint Pierre, Bernardin de
  Paul and Virginia

Sand, George
  Consuelo
  Mauprat

Scott, Michael
  Tom Cringle’s Log

Scott, sir Walter
  Antiquary
  Guy Mannering
  Heart of Midlothian
  Ivanhoe
  Kenilworth
  Old Mortality
  Peveril of the Peak
  (Scott:  Continued in Vol.  VIII.)

Complete Index of the world’s greatest books will be found at the end of
Volume XX

* * * * *

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK

Headlong Hall

The novels of Thomas Love Peacock still find admirers among cultured readers, but his extravagant satire and a certain bookish awkwardness will never appeal to the great novel-reading public.  The son of a London glass merchant, Peacock was born at Weymouth on October 18, 1785.  Early in life he was engaged in some mercantile occupation, which, however, he did not follow up for long.  Then came a period of study, and he became an excellent classical scholar.  His first ambition was to become a poet, and between 1804 and 1806 he published two slender volumes of verse, which attracted little or no attention.  Yet Peacock was a poet of considerable merit, his best work in this direction being scattered at random throughout his novels.  In 1812 he contracted a friendship with Shelley, whose executor he became with Lord Byron.  Peacock’s first novel, “Headlong Hall,” appeared in 1816, and is interesting not so much as a story pure and simple, but as a study of the author’s own temperament.  His personalities are seldom real live characters; they are, rather, mouthpieces created for the purposes of discussion.  Peacock died on January 23, 1866.

I.—­The Philosophers

The ambiguous light of a December morning, peeping through the windows of the Holyhead mail, dispelled the soft visions of the four insides, who had slept, or seemed to sleep, through the first seventy miles of the road.