This new edition of Thomas Love Peacock's works offers loads of context and explanations for terms that have gone by the wayside, and is an excellent introduction to the author's satires. A friend of Shelley and a long-time employee of the East India Company, Peacock's eye for the ridiculous, the antiquated, and society is sharp. You don't read his works for characters or plots as much as you do ideas, and watching ideas transform, and thinking about how those ideas were playing out at the time Peacock was writing. And if there is some excellent wicked wit, that's a bonus. The audience today for Peacock may be largely made up of scholars, but anyone who enjoys the other writing of the time period will find these interesting and potentially illuminating.

It was cool to get old novels packaged new like this. The prose is luscious, as much of the prose was at the time of this book's writing.