Nightmare Abbey

In a gloomy, half-ruined abbey in the Lincolnshire fens live the melancholy Mr Glowry and his son Scythrop, a young man who reads German tragedies, drinks from a skull and plans to reform the world through secret societies, while hopelessly in love with two women at once. The house fills with guests who each embody a fashionable gloom of the day: Mr Flosky, a mystic philosopher no one can understand, Mr Cypress, a poet bitter about the world, and others.

Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) published this short comic novel in 1818, satirising the Romantic moods of his friends: Scythrop is a portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mr Flosky of Coleridge and Mr Cypress of Byron, and Shelley enjoyed the joke. Compare Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, another parody of Gothic fashion.