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Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) |
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English novelist and poet who satirized the political and cultural scene of his time. Although he ridiculed well-known figures of the Romantic movement – William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and others – Peacock's verbal attacks were not aggressive and did not arouse open hostility. Usually Peacock assembles his characters in a country house, where they exchange opinions over a dinner table in a merry atmosphere. The "Socratic dialogues" are leavened by songs, hilarious and extravagant episodes, and romantic love-plots. Beyond the sea, beyond the sea, Thomas Love Peacock was born at Weymouth, in Dorset, the only son of
Samuel Peacock, a London glass merchant, and Sarah Love. Peacock's
maternal grandfather was a master in the Royal Navy. After the death of
his father, the young Thomas Love was brought up by his mother
at Chertsey in his grandfather's house. Peacock was educated at a
private school in Englefield Green. His formal schooling in Greek,
Latin, and French ended before he was 13, but throughout his life he
read omnivorously in five languages. After leaving school, Peacock worked in London as a clerk for Ludlow, Fraser & Co. In his spare time, he sat at the British Museum's Reading Room, studying and writing poetry. His first collection of verse, The Monks of St. Mark, came out in 1804. With the help of a modest inheritance form his father, Peacock was able to live as a man of letters for some years. While staying in Chertsey, Peacock became engaged to Fanny Falkner, whose parents pressured her to break off the engagement. In the winter of 1808-09, he served as a secretary on board H.M.S. Venerable, a "floating Inferno," as he called it. In 1812 Peacock met Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), who greatly inspired his writing. Through Shelley he was drawn into a wider literary circle. On the other hand, Peacock introduced Shelley to pagan myths and imagery. He considered the ancient Greek epic Dionysiaca "the finest poem in the world after the Iliad." Peacock often signed his letters to Shelley as "yours in Pan." Later they were friendly antagonists. Peacock's satirical essay on the value of poetry, The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), provoked Shelley's famous Defence of Poetry (written 1821, published 1840). Peacock became Shelley's literary executor after his death. Peacock claimed that poetry is not one of those arts which require repetition and multiplication – like painting. There are sufficient amount of good poems for all readers and they are far superior to contemporary achievements, "the artificial reconstructions of a few morbid ascetics in unpoetical times." Since poets have become semi-barbarians in a civilized community, their talents would be more usefully employed improving the world in the new sciences. "The highest inspirations of poetry are resolved into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment: and can therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveller like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth." From his own viewpoint Shelley saw, that poetry is a force for social freedom. Poets, such as Chaucer, Dante, and Milton, are "the unacknowledged legislators of the World." Peacock's real stand is hard to define – some of his suggestions are made somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and some of his opinions are not so far-fetched, he does not fit into some mold, and his satire is often double-edged. "Poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society; but for the maturity of mind to make serious business of the playthings of its childhood, is as absurd as for a full-grown man to rub his gums with coral, and cry to be charmed to sleep by the jingle of silver bells." Following a turbulent period in his life, Peacock was jailed for
nonpayment of debts in 1815. To help his friend who was hopeless with
money, Shelley granted him an annuity, which Peacock used to move with
his mother to Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where one of her brothers lived.
Probably due to financial problems – Peacock had published five volumes
of poetry but could not support himself with his writing – he left the
country for
London and took regular employment. He entered the East India Company's
service and became in 1819 an assistant – a well-paid post –
to the Examiner at India House. "It is not in the common routine of
office," Peacock wrote in a letter to Shelley, "but is an employment of
a very interesting and intellectual kind, connected with finance and
legislation, in which it is possible to be of great service not only to
the Company, but to the millions under their dominion." In 1820 Peacock married Jane Gryffydh, the "White Snowdonian antelope" of Shelley's 'Letter to Maria Gisborne'. She suffered in 1826 a breakdown at the death of their third daughter. Never fully recovering, she was a mental invalid until her death in 1851. The eldest daughter, Mary Ellen, married and separated from the writer George Meredith, whom Peacock helped financially. With her Peacock collaborated on an article on 'Gastronomy and Civilization' (Fraser's Magazine, 1851). Mary Ellen died at Capri in 1861. She featured in Meredith's sonnet sequence Modern Love. "The good qualities of a trout," said the little friar, "are firmness and redness: the redness, indeed, being the visible sign of all other virtues." After unsuccessful attempts in poetry and the theatre, Peacock found his special form in the "discussion novel" or novel of ideas, in which conversation predominates over character or plot. This format later inspired Aldous Huxley. The first of Peacock's seven novels was Headlong Hall (1816), a satire of the idealistic aspirations of Romanticism, which presented the elements of his subsequent works. Peacock's favorite setting was a country house, where a group of eccentric guests are seated at a table, eating, drinking sherry or ale, laughing, and embarking on witty or ridiculous discussions in which many common opinions of the day are criticized. He once said that "solitary habits take away many means of forming correct opinions, and prevent opportunities of removing prejudices." Young women provide the necessary characters for the romance, but they rarely participate in the general conversation. Melincourt (1817) was about the early pioneer of
anthropology, Lord Monboddo. One of its characters is an orang-outang
called Sir Oran Haut-Ton, who plays the flute and the French horn. In Crotchet Castle
(1831) the central characters tried to determine the most desirable
period of history. The imaginary place of the title, situated in one of
the valleys of Thames, is famous for its vast collections of statues of
Venus. Reading in the papers an order that that nostatues of the goddess
should appear in the streets without petticoats, Mr. Crotchet had
decided to fill his house with Venuses of all size and kinds. Nightmare Abbey (1818), the author's most famous satirical novel, was written in Marlow.
Peacock used well-known literary figures as models: Mr. Losky was drawn
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Scythorp from Shelley, and Mr. Cypress
from Lord Byron, whose fourth canto of Childe Harold was
the
source of his phrases. Shelley was not disturbed that his relations
with Harriet Westbrook and Mary Godwin was discussed through the
central characters of the novel. Peacock caricatures his friend's
attraction to the idea of changing the world with the help of a secret
society: "He
built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals
and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of
his projected regeneration of the human species." The novel ends with
Skythrop saying, "Bring some Madeira." In the East India Company, Peacock's supervisor was the Scottish utilitarian philosopher and economist James Mill. Peacock succeeded him in 1836 to the responsible position of Examiner, retiring in 1856. Mill's famous son was John Stuart Mill; they both sought to ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Their views also influenced Peacock's interest in social issues, exemplified in Four Ages of Poetry. Following the death of his mother in 1833, Peacock lost interest in writing for a long period. "He loved her with a love beyond that of common natures. He consulted her judgment in all the he wrote," said the North British Review. Though he had once been characterized by Thackeray as a "whiteheaded jolly old wordling," Peacock spent much of his final years in his library, and in his garden. Occasionally, he tried to start to write a satire or romance. He seldom left his home at Lower Halliford, near Chertsey. Founding fulfillment in the quiet life, Peacock devoted himself to the search for peace of body and mind. Peacock died in Lower Halliford, Surrey, on January 23, 1866. His
death followed shortly after a fire drove him to his beloved library,
filled with fine editions of Greek, Latin, and Italian classics, which
he refused to leave. Peacock's last novel, Gryll Grange,
a satire on the mid-Victorian age, appeared in 1860-61. It is
considered by many readers his masterpiece. Peacock's name pops up in
R. F. Kuang's fantasy novel Babel: An Arcane History
(2022). "He is a rabid enthusiast of steam technology, and he put in an
order for six iron steamboats at the shipbuilders Laird's. . . . These
ships are more frightening than anything the waters of Asia have ever
seen." (Ibid., pp. 390-91) For further reading: The Relation of Thomas Love Peacock to His Period by Cornelia Ethel Wood (1907); The Life of Thomas Love Peacock by Carl Van Doren (1911); Life by J.B. Priestley (1927); Life by J.J. Mayoux (1932, in Works); Peacock: His Circle and His Age by Howard Mills (1968); Thomas Love Peacock by Robert Forbes Felton (1973); Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context by Marilyn Butler (1979); The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock by Bryan Burns (1985): Thomas Love Peacock by James Mulvihill (1987); Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel: Thomas Love Peacock, Max Beerbohm, Ronald Firbank, E.F. Benson, P.G. Wodehouse, Ivy Compton-Burnett by Robert F. Kiernan (1990); Peacock's Progress: Aspects of Artistic Development in the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock by Margaret McKay (1992); The Characters in the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, 1785- 1866: With Bibliographical Lists by Claude A. Prance (1992); The Christian Faith and practice of Samuel Johnson, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock by Neil Tomkinson Lewiston (1992); Humor and Transgression in Peacock, Shelley, and Byron: A Cold Carnival by Thomas H. Schmid (1992); Encyclopedia of British Humorists: Geoffrey Chaucer to John Cleese, Volume 2 L-W, edited by Steven H. Gale (1996); Satire and Parody in the Fiction of Thomas Love Peacock and the Early Writings of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1815-1850 by Mary Elizabeth Rontree (2005); Romantic Paganism: The Politics of Ecstasy in the Shelley Circle by Suzanne L. Barnett (2017); The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler (2018) Selected works:
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