Gryll Grange

by Thomas Love Peacock

"Gryll Grange" is an 1861 novel by Thomas Love Peacock. His seventh and last novel, it tells the story of Gregory Gryll, a descendant of the ancient and noble Gryllus who, for lack of better options, chooses his niece to be his heir. However, Gryll's plan falls short when his new heir finds it difficult to find a man to her particular tastes. Thomas Love Peacock (18 October 1785 - 23 January 1866) was an English poet, novelist, and important figure in the East India Company. A good friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, they both had a significant influence on each other's work. Peacock was most famous for writing satirical novels, which usually involved characters sat around a table discussing contemporary philosophical ideas. Other notable works by this author "Headlong Hall" (1815), "Melincourt" (1817), and "Nightmare Abbey" (1818). Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with intoductory essays by Sir Walter Raleigh and Virginia Woolf.

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

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1861

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

[Yngvild · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gryll Grange was the last of Thomas Love Peacock’s novels, published when he was seventy-five. It reads as though he threw in all those things that he had never found a good place for before. The result is extraordinary: very, very good at its best, just plain odd at its worst.

In fewer than 300 pages, Gryll Grange includes a number of poems, several acts of a comedy based on Aristophanes’ Clouds, a good deal of after-dinner conversation about literature and philosophy, some wicked satire and a couple of extremely strange rants. The grand finale contains a wedding for nine couples. All this came from a man who had to leave school at thirteen and educate himself at the local reading library, albeit the one at the British Museum.

Mr. Gryll. I am afraid we live in a world of misnomers, and of a worse kind than this. In my little experience I have found that a gang of swindling bankers is a respectable old firm; that men who sell their votes to the highest bidder, and want only 'the protection of the ballot' to sell the promise of them to both parties, are a free and independent constituency; that a man who successively betrays everybody that trusts him, and abandons every principle he ever professed, is a great statesman, and a Conservative, forsooth, a nil conservando; that schemes for breeding pestilence are sanitary improvements; that the test of intellectual capacity is in swallow, and not in digestion; that the art of teaching everything, except what will be of use to the recipient, is national education; and that a change for the worse is reform. – Gryll Grange, Thomas Love Peacock (1860)

The trick with Peacock, even more than other satirists, seems to be to never forget that the characters are not necessarily declaiming the author’s views. In fact, the whole point is often to make the opinions so ridiculous that we can never again take them seriously. For example, if I had not known that Peacock had recommended the use of steamboats to the East India Company, I might have really believed his diatribes against those infernal, exploding machines.

Intertwined in all this is a love story that could have come straight from Shakespeare with its couples swapping partners until they got it right. These lovers are not the vapid little fortune-hunting minxes and two-dimensional possessors of fortunes of Jane Austen. They are intelligent, educated people with interesting things to say about life and marriage. For these chapters alone, Gryll Grange is worth reading.

[Wendi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last if Peacock's novels, the humour here is kinder, gentler, and also less laugh out loud funny. He has more plot than conversation, a welcome departure.
He has his cranks and crotchets and condemnations of modern progress (starships and telegraphs, whist, the competitive examination) which make for some of the humour. Keep in mind some of the crotchets are not truly his, but those of his characters.

The romances are amusing and I see Peacock here as a link between Shakespeare's Twelth Night or the Tèmpest and any Gilbert and Sullivan.
A pleasant read.

One important exception to the pleasant reading is a chapter where the company discuss American slavery and the character of the African race, and another section where they discuss Cleopatra and why she was Greek and not Nubian. While this is true, the terms of both the discussions were grotesque to today's reader and should have been to Peacock himself.

[Bettie]

nutty nuut

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Made me realize I need to read more classic works from Greek and Roman times, because the references are many. Also helps to read Greek, I suppose. At places, laugh out loud funny. Will need to read again.

[Laura]

Free download available at Project Gutenberg.