Crotchet Castle

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.

Freya Johnston is a University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in English at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is the author of Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709–1791 (2005) and co-editor of Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (2012).
Matthew Bevis is a University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in English at Keble College, Oxford. He is author of The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (2007) and Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (2012), and editor of Some Versions of Empson (2007) and The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (2013).