Nightmare Abbey Author Thomas Love Peacock Country United Kingdom Language English Genre Gothic novella, Romance novella, Satire Published November 1818, T. Hookham Jr. and Baldwin, Craddock & Joy Nightmare Abbey. Dilapidated mansion in England’s Lincolnshire County; a former monastery whose state of sad disrepair reflects the plight of its residents, the deeply dysfunctional Glowry family. The house is not far from the sea, being separated therefrom by a tract of low-lying fenland dotted with windmills. There is nothing unrealistic about an early nineteenth century English family living in what once had been an abbey; many English religious houses became secular residences following King Henry VIII’s dissolution of England’s Roman Catholic monasteries in the sixteenth century. The abbey’s address reveals something about the Glowry family’s problematic social status—they are products of social upheavals that were still considered ...