Born on this day in 1785 was Thomas Love Peacock. I last wrote about him more than a decade ago, when I characterised him as that rare thing among literary men, a 'good egg':
'The list of classic writers who seem to have been thoroughly decent good people, and who we sense would be enjoyable company, is not long. Keats and Chekhov for sure, Charles Lamb, probably Jane Austen... One who can be added to the list was Thomas Love Peacock.
Peacock – friend of Shelley (and defender of his maligned first wife) and, for a while, father-in-law of George Meredith – worked, like Lamb, for the East India Company. He outlined a day's work there thus:
From eleven to noon, think you've come too soon;
From twelve to one, think what's to be done;
From one to two, find nothing to do;
From two to three, think it will be
A very great bore to stay till four.
But in fact Peacock worked hard and well, succeeding James Mill as Chief Examiner of Indian Correspondence (and being succeeded by John Stuart Mill). He appeared often before parliamentary committees, and is even credited with designing the first armoured steamboats used by the Royal Navy.
His novels – from Headlong Hall to Gryll Grange – are like nothing else in English literature. Hardly bothering with plot or character, he simply gathers together a group of people – often representative of particular ways of thinking – and lets them talk, with occasional interludes of often farcical action, and frequent songs and lyrics, mostly celebrating the pleasures of food and drink. One of his novels (Melincourt) features an orang-utan, Sir Auron Haut-Ton, who stands for Parliament; another (Nightmare Abbey) contains a humorous portrait of Shelley as Scythrop Glowry, author of Philosophical Gas; or, A Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind. Written by a less deft hand, with the satire laid on more heavily, these novels would surely have sunk without trace, but they survive and are still – once you get used to Peacock's way of doing things – great fun to read.
The genial comic spirit that suffuses the novels seems to have come naturally to the man. His granddaughter remembered Peacock in old age as 'ever a welcome guest, his genial manner, hearty appreciation of wit and humour in others, and the amusing way in which he told stories made him a very delightful acquaintance; he was always so agreeable and so very witty that he was called by his most intimate friends the "Laughing Philosopher", and it seems to me that the term "Epicurean Philosopher", which I have often heard applied to him, describes him accurately and briefly. In public business my grandfather was upright and honourable; but as he advanced in years his detestation of anything disagreeable made him simply avoid whatever fretted him, laughing off all sorts of ordinary calls upon his leisure time.' [A sound policy for later life.]
He's described elsewhere as 'a rare instance of a man improved by prosperity' and 'a kind-hearted, genial, friendly man, who loved to share his enjoyment of life with all around him, and self-indulgent without being selfish.' It would surely have been pleasant indeed to know Mr Peacock.'
Kingley Amis, in an essay collected in What Became of Jane Austen? (19700, casts a discriminating eye over Peacock's novels, concluding that 'a line must be drawn somewhere between the living and the faded parts of his work, but merely to draw the line between living and faded targets of ridicule ... would not be quite adequate. To throw in a reflection on Peacock's inordinate capacity for simple diffuseness and repetition would have the advantage of helping to get Melincourt and Gryll Grange out of the way (where they belong) [a harsh judgment: nothing Peacock wrote is particularly long, and Gryll Grange at least is very readable], but would be little use on the harder question. What can we turn to next, then? To plot versus no plot? No: the answer that appeals to me is that Peacock was only at his best in farcical-sentimental comedy with a satiric background. The moment the satirist holds the stage he makes a dive for the lectern, and the reader, unfortified with cold fowl and Madeira, spreads a handkerchief over his face.' [That's Amis the comic novelist breaking through in the last sentence.]
'Almost the whole of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey' survive Amis's critical scrutiny (along with parts of several other novels), and that would seem a very fair judgment. He characterises Peacock as 'far more energetically original' than even his admirers have often realised, and ends with a perfect summing-up: 'That enchanting urbanity, which gave him command of a whole range between witty seriousness and demented knockabout, was something which disappeared from the English novel almost before it had properly arrived.' Yes, and more's the pity.
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