The Misfortunes of Elphin and Rhododaphne; Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey; Gryll Grange (Three Volumes, Five Stories, 1896 & 1897)

All three volumes are in very nice condition. You can see the covers in the photos. The front and rear have what appears to be a floral, pebbled design, maroon colored, quite clean. The gilt lettering on front and spine of each is still nicely bright. The top and bottom edges of the spines have the usual bit of crinkling. There are two spots of color fade on the spine of the volume Gryll Grange. The cover edges on all three volumes are in very good shape. The cover corners on two of the volumes have only tiny spots of superficial rubbing. On the third, Gryll Grange, three of the corners have just a little bit more wear, and the fourth, the rear bottom one, has a thin spot of rub-through. The middle and bottom page edges of two of the volumes are deckled or rough-cut. That is not the case with the other volume which contains The Misfortunes of Elphin and Rhododaphne. On this volume only the bottom page edge is deckled or rough-cut. The bindings of all three volumes are very solid. The spine on The Misfortunes of Elphin and Rhododaphne has a slight to moderate forward lean. The pages on this volume and the other two volumes are nicely tight, as are the covers. There are no binding issues with any of the covers. I found one or two instances in both Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey and Gryll Grange where there was a very thin space at the juncture between two facing pages. In each instance both facing pages were tightly bound from top to bottom. The pages in all three volumes are exceptionally clean. Scrolling through, I didn't find any instances of soiling. If I missed something, it wouldn't have been conspicuous. I didn't find any significant creasing. You'll see an occasional instance of a slight crease or semi-crease at a corner, not much at all. I saw only a few tiny edge tears, again nothing significant, that occasionally occurs on some rough-cut pages, nothing near to the print, and again very few. I didn't see any markings. I didn't find any writing of any kind anywhere. One volume, Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, has a bookplate on its blank front end paper. That same end paper has a tiny bit of paper missing at its top corner. There are no other attachments to be found anywhere in any of the volumes. 'Thomas Love Peacock 1785-1866) was an English novelist, poet, and official of the East India Company. He was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and they influenced each other's work. Peacock wrote satirical novels, each with the same basic setting: characters at a table discussing and criticising the philosophical opinions of the day. Peacock's comedy combines the mock-Gothic with the Aristophanic. He suffers from that dramatist's faults and, though not as daring in invention or as free in the use of sexual humour, shares many of his strengths. His greatest intellectual love is for Ancient Greece, including late and minor works such as the Dionysiaca of Nonnus; many of his characters are given punning names taken from Greek to indicate their personality or philosophy. He tended to dramatize where traditional novelists narrated; he is more concerned with the interplay of ideas and opinions than of feelings and emotions; his dramatis personae is more likely to consist of a cast of more or less equal characters than of one outstanding hero or heroine and a host of minor auxiliaries; his novels have a tendency to approximate the Classical unities, with few changes of scene and few if any subplots; his novels are novels of conversation rather than novels of action; in fact, Peacock is so much more interested in what his characters say to one another than in what they do to one another that he often sets out entire chapters of his novels in dialogue form. Plato's Symposium is the literary ancestor of these works, by way of the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus, in which the conversation relates less to exalted philosophical themes than to the points of a good fish dinner.'.…