Eglinton Tournament of 1839 romanticism and praise of chivalric ideals. Walpole himself was one of the first in England to renovate his mansion into a mock-Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill (1749–1777). Medieval culture was widely admired as an antidote to the modern enlightenment and industrial age. Plays and theatrical works (such as "Ivanhoe", which in 1820 was playing in six different productions in London alone) perpetuated the romanticism of knights, castles, feasts and tournaments. Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) of Germany painted magnificent Gothic ruins and spiritual allegories. Jane Austen (1775–1815) wrote her novel "Northanger Abbey" (written 1798, published 1817) as a satire on romantic affectation.
Northanger Abbey the trip to Bath, Mrs. Allen is too incapable of independent thought to properly guide Catherine through social situations. She runs into Mrs. Thorpe, a woman she knew fifteen years before at boarding school, which leads to her and Catherine spending much of their time in Bath with the Thorpes. According to notes written by Austen's sister Cassandra after her death in 1817, the novel was finished by 1798 or 1799. The close resemblance in style to Austen's "juvenilia" of the early 1790s together with several in-jokes that only the Austen family could have appreciated strongly suggests that book was