Peacock’s plumage

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...