Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats: the giants of English Romantic verse still loom large in our literary landscape, despite the twenty-first century’s attempts to decolonize the canon. Turn to prose and we think of Hazlitt, De Quincey, (Mary) Shelley, perhaps Lamb, and, arguably, the Brontës. But when the net is cast out, who gathers in Thomas Love Peacock—poet, novelist, and satirist?
Peacock (1785–1866) was the most urbane and erudite of them all: a formidable mind and a shrewd, amused observer of literary and intellectual society who gently lampooned what he saw in a handful of crisp, brilliant novels. For those unfamiliar with his works, think of P. G. Wodehouse’s inspired nonsense and Jerome K. Jerome’s witty wisdom, and then add a generous layer of wide-ranging learning. He was a member of the cultural circles about which he so charmingly wrote, but he distanced himself sufficiently to write with affectionate mockery; he did not hesitate, for instance, repeatedly to make fun of his friend Shelley. Perhaps his career in the East India Company, in which he rose to the prestigious rank of examiner in 1836, kept him more rooted in quotidian reality than many of his more devotedly versifying friends. Peacock was no mean poet, essayist, or letter-writer either—and his endeavors in those media deserve separate appreciation—but it was his novels that secured his fame and success.
That success is hard to gauge now, but Peacock remained an important and very popular writer into the early twentieth century, at which time all his works were still in print from leading publishers. Though they fell out of print during the last century, Cambridge University Press is now more than halfway through republishing all seven of Peacock’s novels in marvelous, fully annotated scholarly editions that will prove definitive. The recent appearance of Headlong Hall and Melincourt, his first two novels, offers a timely opportunity to reengage with this most brilliant but neglected of writers.1
A flurry of writing saw Peacock produce his first three novels in swift succession: Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), and Nightmare Abbey (1818). These set the template for his familiar settings: welcoming country houses, loquacious and cerebral dinner parties, and pleasant excursions into the countryside. (The exceptions are the later historical novels Maid Marian from 1822 and The Misfortunes of Elphin from 1829.) Rarely do we encounter serious peril or truly malicious behavior; instead, we are borne along on a pleasant stream of amiability. Throughout all the novels, be they set in the present or past, Peacock toys with and mocks the current trends and fashions that preoccupy the chattering classes of his day, never viciously, always playfully. The effect on the receptive reader is one of utter delight at sharing in Peacock’s literary world of conviviality and intellectual merrymaking. Similarly, the plots are almost inconsequential frames—innovatively so for the time—on which to air the topical laundry of the day.
It has been said that Peacock was writing in the style of two ancient traditions: anatomizing satire, as perfected by Swift (though Peacock has none of his acerbity); and Socratic dialogue, as presented in Plato’s Symposium. While Peacock undoubtedly drew on these genres as vehicles for his fiction, his work was very much his own, and not much emulated. He clearly knew what structure with which to present his short novels (little more than novellas, in fact; only Melincourt we might call a full-length novel) for maximum efficiency; the exchanges in his conversational tales are mostly set as theatrical dialogue.
Headlong Hall is centered around a dinner at Squire Headlong’s manor house in Wales (a popular setting for the Cambrophile Peacock). The invited diners represent various ideals and schools of thoughts, which ensures plenty of animated discussion and disagreement. These include Mr. Milestone, a celebrated gardener; Dr. Gaster, a greedy Epicurean cleric; Mr. Jenkinson, the “status-quo-ite” middle-of-the-roader; Mr. Cranium, the phrenologist; Mr. Foster, a “perfectibilian” optimist; and his foil, Mr. Escot, the gloomy, deteriorationist Malthusian who dominates proceedings. (Peacock loved to devise appropriately comical names for his characters; he might well have used “Wordsworth” had it not already been taken.) Female roles are kept to a minimum, but they allow for some commentary on marriage.
The protagonists gather for Christmas festivities at Squire Headlong’s ancestral home. Headlong has a penchant for intellectual company, though not necessarily intellectual pursuits; he is far too impulsive to discipline himself for that. His impetuous behavior extends to all his activities, including shooting:
This rapidity of movement, indeed, subjected him to some disasters which cooler spirits would have escaped. He was an excellent sportsman, and almost always killed his game; but now and then he killed his dog.
His desire to be thought of as a philosopher and a man of taste once took him on an expedition to seek similar spirits in Oxford, where he was “assured by a learned professor that there were no such things in the University.” He generally has more success in London. Dr. Gaster qualifies to be a guest because he has written “a learned dissertation on the art of stuffing a turkey,” expertise that could be put to good use at the Christmas table. Already we have here a nice example of Peacock’s approach, giving equal attention to culinary delights and to mockery of the supposed intelligentsia.
The central character of Escot gently captures the easy hypocrisy in most of us. He espouses vegetarianism and rhapsodizes on the berry-picking of early man (meat having contributed, naturally, to man’s fall), even as he is “helping himself at the same time to a slice of the beef” at breakfast. He is also chided by Peacock for wanting to ameliorate his own situation through marriage to the delightful Cephalis, the daughter of Mr. Cranium. At this breakfast, Dr. Gaster nurses an injury. The coachman’s call of “Breakfast, gentlemen” so “gladdened the ears of the divine, that the alacrity with which [Gaster] sprang from the vehicle superinduced a distortion of his ankle.” While recovering, he joins in the debate—as he was wont to do, at a good repast—to offer gastro-theological observations, preaching that “loaves and fishes are typical of a mixed diet.”
Mr. Milestone, a caricature of the famous landscape gardener Humphry Repton, wants to blow up large parts of the natural landscape in Headlong’s grounds so as to haughtily improve on Mother Nature. The artist Sir Patrick O’Prism is opposed to the scheme, claiming the end would result, as the endeavors of all of Milestone’s profession do (he is here also alluding to Capability Brown), “in nothing but big bowling-greens . . . and a solitary animal here and there looking as if it were lost.” But the spontaneous Headlong, who possesses barrels of gunpowder “for the supply of a small battery of cannon, which he kept for his private amusement,” readily agrees to Milestone’s designs. The precipitate explosion launches poor Mr. Cranium into a rocky pool, which necessitates a rescue.
The inevitable ball brings matters to a conclusion, with an equally inevitable slew of marriages. Peacock’s treatment of this sacred institution may seem somewhat irreverent (and all the more so given his uxoriousness in real life). The widower Mr. Cranium asserts: “as marriage has been compared to a pill, I can very safely assert that one is a dose.” In Melincourt, a character opines: “Marriage may sometimes be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horse pond.” But Squire Headlong is Peacock’s mouthpiece for a defense of marriage, even if the flurry of betrothals is not always romantic: in Headlong Hall, Cranium agrees to part with his daughter in exchange for a fine skull (allegedly that of the Welsh king Cadwallader) that the suitor Escot procured to win over his father-in-law to be.
Peacock delights in having his characters give prolix speeches of meaningless academic jargon to perplexed audiences (readers, too, may need a good dictionary at hand). Pretensions are punctured while opportunities are exploited for mockery. One entire chapter is given over to phrenology. During his lecture, Cranium, displaying an array of skulls, compares Christopher Wren’s with that of a beaver, both being builders—not something one is likely to encounter in any other novel. Further on he produces a human skull displaying a “striking” lack of “benevolence” and “attachment,” and “equally striking” signs of “destruction, cunning, avarice, and self-love. This was one of the most illustrious statesmen that ever flourished in the page of history.”
The novel’s main debate concerns “perfectibilism,” a notion well known to us after a century (and counting) of social engineering. How painfully relevant is this hubristic opinion of Mr. Foster: “Men are virtuous in proportion as they are enlightened; as every generation increases in knowledge, it also increases in virtue.” He later claims that man will attain “the final step of pure perfect intelligence.” While Peacock makes plenty of fun of Foster’s glum antithesis, Mr. Escot, it is the deteriorationist who gets the better of the argument.
Melincourt is the longest and arguably least satisfying of Peacock’s novels, an experimental second novel that does not work as well as his others. (Peacock returned to the winning formula of Headlong Hall after Melincourt.) While all the familiar elements remain, its attempts to be more novelistic lack some sharpness. Here the satire, set in northwest England, very much focuses on the corrupt political system, with Peacock displaying his radical inclinations. The plot—more to the fore in this second novel—owes much to Samuel Richardson’s best-selling Clarissa. The villainous Lord Anophel Achthar abducts the heroine Anthelia Melincourt, a wealthy young heiress, whose character has been formed by the beauty of her natural environment. Achthar is abetted by his sycophantic cleric friend, the Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub. She is rescued by an “orang-outan,” the Sir Oran Haut-ton of the novel’s later subtitle, an embodiment of Rousseau’s noble savage. Sir Oran has been raised and educated by the idealistic primitivist Mr. Sylvan Forester and is now a chivalrous, flute-playing Member of Parliament for the bought seat of One Vote. The sole human attribute missing is that of speech. Sir Oran allows Peacock to expose the failings of “civilized” society (which is not an original idea in itself; see More’s Utopia) by drawing on the claim of the eccentric philosopher Lord Monboddo that orangutans were essentially human. It all allows for plenty of mirth as Sir Oran is returned to Parliament through the support of Mr. Christopher Corporate.
What stands out in Melincourt is Peacock’s growing confidence to mock his own literary circle and the reactionary development of the Lake Poets: Mr. Feathernest (Robert Southey), Mr. Paperstamp (William Wordsworth), and Mr. Mystic (Samuel Coleridge), all pulled “into the vortex of courtly patronage.” Peacock also makes fun of his friend Shelley’s politics and ideals through Forester. In Mr. Fax, we have an economist of the Malthusian school in a similar vein as Escot and, one would think, Edmund Burke’s “sophisters, economists and calculators” in his eulogy for the lost age of chivalry.
Marriage once again figures heavily. Here we see how relevant Peacock remains for us today, when ordinary people are still being bossed by their betters into taking directions that suit the preoccupations of the latter rather than their own far more important practical concerns. Peacock manages this disconnect beautifully when he has the Malthusian Fax remonstrate against a couple of young villager yokels on their way to be married. Much put out, the joyless Fax harangues them, warning “of the evils that awaited them in consequence of the rash step they were about to take.” He instructs them as a representative of “general reason,” prompting the bridegroom Robin to ask: “We bean’t be under martial law, be we?” Fax issues what he sees as a dire warning: “in the course of six years, you will have as many children.” “The more the merrier,” replies Robin. Fax continues the scolding, but Robin is more than a match for the educated killjoy: “That be all mighty voine rigmarol; but the short and the long be this: I can’t live without Zukey, nor Zukey without I, can you Zukey?” They proceed with the nuptials.
While Headlong Hall remained Peacock’s most popular novel, many readers, such as this one, find Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle (both republished by Cambridge in 2017) the best of them all. The editors of the Cambridge series treat them with equal care and impressive attention. Nightmare Abbey especially benefits from the editorial help, which identifies the real-life characters being mocked. Peacock’s dismissal of contemporary doomsayers is very evident once again: writing to Shelley about his forthcoming novel, he stated that his intent was to “bring a sort of philosophical focus to a few of the morbidities of modern literature, and to let in a little daylight on its atrabilarious complexion” (atrabilarious was one of Peacock’s favorite words). Like Austen in her Northanger Abbey from the year before (1817), Peacock takes a shot at Gothic novels and, for good measure, the Romantic movement, the novel’s hero Scythrop Glowry being a comic representation of Shelley. Crotchet Castle’s hero, Mr. Chainmail, is a living embodiment of the romantic (small-R) and chivalrous past and marks a withdrawal from Peacock’s contemporary-symposium novels until Gryll Grange in 1860, six years before his death. It was almost as if the rapid and acerbic industrialization and modernization of the century were too much for this gentle antiquarian.
Peacock’s novels have timeless appeal, both as entertainment and enlightenment. In 1837, he wrote that the “perfectibilians, deteriorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts . . . will march forever.” Indeed, many on this sad list remain ascendant today. Peacock recognized that people will always disagree; he allows them to do so amicably and good-humoredly. Oh, that it could be so in what passes for our current discourse in these enraged times. Of arguments themselves, he wrote that they end “as most controversies do, by each party continuing firm in his own opinion, and professing his profound astonishment at the blindness and prejudices of the other.” Peacock usually leaves his animated arguments unresolved. Like him, we do not need to take sides; just enjoy mock-erudition being mocked.
Peacock was a true man of letters in every sense, but attractively lacking in self-importance and pretensions, unlike the objects of his humor. With this wonderful new publishing enterprise from Cambridge, his sparkling spirit and intellect can be appreciated once again.
Pavonians rejoice!
