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Peacock’s Progress

The ups and downs of literary reputations are often slightly mysterious. I still find it strange, though, that although we pay ample homage to most of the heavyweights of the nineteenth century, one of the best and liveliest of them all has been allowed to fade from view. Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) deserves much better than that. I find his writings – sceptical, dry and sparkling with wit – as rewarding today as when I first read them many years ago.

Perhaps a present-day reader coming fresh to his novels should be warned that they resemble those of no other writer. Peacock pretty well invented a form new to English literature, the ‘Peacockian novel’, a kind of hybrid between conversation and narrative. He also invented a private world: an attractive and comfortable world it is too, where a continuous intellectual comedy takes place in a setting of Arcadian landscape.

Peacock’s method is to assemble a gaggle of opinionated characters at a country house, supply them with a more or less preposterous plot, and then let them indulge in a feast of disputatious talk. They eat and drink merrily, take walks to admire the scenery, make expeditions by boat – but the talk is the main thing. Each participant has his own crotchet (‘a whimsical fancy, a perverse conceit’ – OED) and propounds it with vigour. In this genial way Peacock satirizes the crazes and trendy notions of his time (not essentially unlike those of today). He has influenced some later writers. Aldous Huxley called Crome Yellow his Peacockian novel, choosing the thinly disguised Garsington Manor of Lady Ottoline Morrell for its setting.

Peacock was sometimes called the court jester of the Romantic movement, and some of his characters bear a mocking resemblance to the leading Romantics. Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth are to be spotted among the caricatures. But although Peacock wrote for and about his own times, human folly does not date. My fav

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The ups and downs of literary reputations are often slightly mysterious. I still find it strange, though, that although we pay ample homage to most of the heavyweights of the nineteenth century, one of the best and liveliest of them all has been allowed to fade from view. Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) deserves much better than that. I find his writings – sceptical, dry and sparkling with wit – as rewarding today as when I first read them many years ago.

Perhaps a present-day reader coming fresh to his novels should be warned that they resemble those of no other writer. Peacock pretty well invented a form new to English literature, the ‘Peacockian novel’, a kind of hybrid between conversation and narrative. He also invented a private world: an attractive and comfortable world it is too, where a continuous intellectual comedy takes place in a setting of Arcadian landscape. Peacock’s method is to assemble a gaggle of opinionated characters at a country house, supply them with a more or less preposterous plot, and then let them indulge in a feast of disputatious talk. They eat and drink merrily, take walks to admire the scenery, make expeditions by boat – but the talk is the main thing. Each participant has his own crotchet (‘a whimsical fancy, a perverse conceit’ – OED) and propounds it with vigour. In this genial way Peacock satirizes the crazes and trendy notions of his time (not essentially unlike those of today). He has influenced some later writers. Aldous Huxley called Crome Yellow his Peacockian novel, choosing the thinly disguised Garsington Manor of Lady Ottoline Morrell for its setting. Peacock was sometimes called the court jester of the Romantic movement, and some of his characters bear a mocking resemblance to the leading Romantics. Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth are to be spotted among the caricatures. But although Peacock wrote for and about his own times, human folly does not date. My favourite among the novels, Crotchet Castle, was as topical in its day as Private Eye, but its fun is still fresh. And whatever the topic, Peacock’s elegantly stylish prose is a joy to read. The descriptions of the beautiful places in which he sets his house parties are delightful. So too are the  romantic interludes, which he presents in a half-serious, half-amused way. One feels that he wrote, as he should be read, for pleasure. A typically engaging character is Dr Folliott, who dominates the dinner table at Crotchet Castle much in the manner of Dr Johnson, specializing in delivering amiable blasts of good sense. Often, of course, he is a mouthpiece for Peacock’s own robust opinions. One fellow-diner, baffled by a speech from this character in which Coleridge is lampooned, says sadly, ‘I have read the divine Kant, sir, with an anxious desire to understand him; and I confess I have not succeeded.’ Dr Folliott explains the problem neatly: ‘He wants the two great requisites of head and tail.’ Peacock is happy when satirizing the ‘march of mind’, in his day the fashionable term for Progress, which, as Dr Folliott knew and we know, is all too often in the wrong direction. His barbs land on busybody politicians and bureaucrats who prosper at the public expense, as well as on transcendental philosophers whose obscurities numb the mind. One might wonder how, while making comedy out of the poets and thinkers of his acquaintance, he remained on good terms with them. I imagine this was because he was never unkind to his victims personally. Instead he made fun of their wild ideas and intellectual extravagances. His friendship with Shelley (an entirely different sort of person) was surprisingly close and he was named as the poet’s executor; yet he once wrote, of his days with the Shelleys and their circle, that he was ‘irreverent enough to laugh at the fervour with which opinions utterly unconducive to any practical result were battled for as matters of the highest importance’. Such was the essential Peacockian attitude. His idiosyncratic style was revealed plainly in the very first of his novels, Headlong Hall. This has the usual assortment of crotcheteers in a country house, in this case among the mountains of Wales. We meet Mr Escot, the ‘deteriorationist’, whose denunciation of false Progress is positively Swiftian: ‘These improvements, as you call them, appear to be only so many links in the great chain of corruption, which will soon fetter the whole human race in slavery.’ So much for the Industrial Revolution. Mr Escot reminds me of Dr Opimian, a character in the last of the Peacock novels, Gryll Grange, who declares: ‘Science is an edged tool with which men play like children and cut their own fingers . . . I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race.’ That was thought atrociously reactionary in 1860. We can less comfortably dismiss it today. Against Mr Escot are set Mr Foster, the ‘perfectibilarian’, who rejoices in ‘the progress of the species towards moral and intellectual perfection’, and a third guest of  Squire Headlong, Mr Jenkinson, the ‘status-quo-ite’. All three argue (in elegant Peacockian language) for and against progress, and much else. Peacock was himself as ripe a character as any he depicted. He left school at an early age, attended no university, but by solitary study turned himself into a notable classical scholar and man of letters. He had a poor opinion of the universities of his day (one of his characters refers caustically to ‘the undisturbed libraries’ of Oxford) and, thanks to modest private means, his early adult years were passed in agree able idleness, studying, travelling and writing poetry. Eventually the money dried up, so Peacock found employment with the East India Company, where his brains and an unexpected gift for administration took him right to the top. He ended up as the equivalent of a modern Whitehall mandarin, secure and well-rewarded. Clearly he had a fondness for accomplished young women. They usually shine in his novels as beacons of sense amid the fog of disputation. Crotchet Castle contains the delightful Clarinda, whose droll and witty teasing of a besotted suitor is clever and funny. When Peacock himself felt able to take a wife he proposed by letter to a girl he had met in Wales eight years earlier and had not seen since: a nicely Peacockian romance. The marriage was happy, although his bride’s health was not good. It was an unpredictable life story, in which the footloose poet was transmogrified into a pillar of society. Happily the satirist within him flourished undimmed, and his talent for witty appraisal of the follies of the world never weakened. It is a shame that the modern world of publishing should show so little interest in him and his works.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 5 © J. W. M. Thompson 2005


About the contributor

J. W. M. Thompson now lives in rural Norfolk, but he thinks his years in Fleet Street (ten of them as Editor of the Sunday Telegraph) helped him to appreciate Peacock’s interest in the dottier aspects of human nature.

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