UNLIMITED Audiobooks and eBooks

Over 40,000 books & works on all major devices

Get ALL YOU CAN for FREE for 30 days!

Headlong Hall

Thomas Love Peacock

Book Overview: 

Headlong Hall is the first novel by Thomas Love Peacock. As in his later novel Crotchet Castle, Peacock assembles a group of eccentrics, each with a single monomaniacal obsession, and derives humor and social satire from their various interactions and conversations. The setting is the country estate of Squire Harry Headlong Ap-Rhaiader, Esq. in Wales. (Summary by Wikipedia)

How does All You Can Books work?

All You Can Books gives you UNLIMITED access to over 40,000 Audiobooks, eBooks, and Foreign Language courses. Download as many audiobooks, ebooks, language audio courses, and language e-workbooks as you want during the FREE trial and it's all yours to keep even if you cancel during the FREE trial. The service works on any major device including computers, smartphones, music players, e-readers, and tablets. You can try the service for FREE for 30 days then it's just $19.99 per month after that. So for the price everyone else charges for just 1 book, we offer you UNLIMITED audio books, e-books and language courses to download and enjoy as you please. No restrictions.

Book Excerpt: 
. . .harmonies of light and shade, melting into one another, as you see them on that rock over yonder. I never saw one of your improved places, as you call them, and which are nothing but big bowling-greens, like sheets of green paper, with a parcel of round clumps scattered over them, like so many spots of ink, flicked at random out of a pen,[4.1] and a solitary animal here and there looking as if it were lost, that I did not think it was for all the world like Hounslow Heath, thinly sprinkled over with bushes and highwaymen.”

“Sir,” said Mr Milestone, “you will have the goodness to make a distinction between the picturesque and the beautiful.”

“Will I?” said Sir Patrick, “och! but I won't. For what is beautiful? That what pleases the eye. And what pleases the eye? Tints variously broken and blended. Now, tints variously broken and blended constitute the picturesque.”Read More

Community Reviews

I read this because it was mentioned in The Moving Toyshop, which I loved, so I was curious. This was written in 1815 and I was floored by how the opinions variously expressed seemed to be very modern and the humor was still funny almost 200 years later. The language is difficult but I think that wa

I had never heard of this author, until his name popped up on the Guardian's list of 1000 novels everyone must read. I enjoyed it more than not--there were a couple of places I laughed out loud, but it was a little too jokey for me. Short though.

A satirical, and sometimes even slapstick, look at th

In the first of Peacock’s books (published in 1815), an intellectually curious Welsh aristocrat hosts a holiday gathering with a guest list including a progressivist, a deteriorationist, a phrenologist, a landscape designer, a lady novelist, and others. If not quite as successful as Peacock’s more f

Headlong Hall was the first of Thomas Love Peacock's novels and the simplest. I suppose it was intended as satire, but there is no longer any way of identifying who the characters represent among Peacock's contemporaries, except where he specifies in the notes. Happily, it works as comedy, even if i

View More Reviews