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)