His fine wit
Give or take a few months, it is the 130th anniversary of the death of Thomas Love Peacock. B'gad! you exclaim, has he been gone from us for that long a time?
Of course there's a chance, I grant, that among you there could be some few who have never heard of the gentleman. What a pity.
Peacock is my love, my passion. To put a name to it, I'm "Peacockian" — a word that henceforth should be squeezed into the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, I suggest, on page 1534.
Unfortunately, I know no other in my immediate circle of acquaintances who is similarly inclined. If I am a cultist, for the time being, I am the only one. (Grant me a Peacock revival, if you please, with its own Peacock Society, merchandising arm and regular gathering of aficionados quaffing wine and pontificating.)
My live-in companion and sprog mother does not share my enthusiasm. For her, as befits the moment, to be knee deep in Jane Austen will suffice. (Of us two — if you happen upon us while out and about — she is the austentatious one.) This I can live with. Dearest Jane died two years before TLP published his first "novel" — and I use the term loosely. Another six similar works of whatever were to follow.
But you get an idea of the period — cute little bonnets, mutton chop whiskers, empire line dresses, 18-hour work days — that sort of thing.
It was the time of our green forebears, the Romantics — and their odes to this and that — who didn't much care for the local climate of soot. Days gone by, before the common lands were enclosed and the factories built, seemed eminently preferable. Among them, for a time, as friend to the radical romantic and poet, Percy Shelley, was our own Thomas Love Peacock. This is how we usually make his acquaintance — as a meat eating member of Shelley's circle.
While Shelley was victim to frequent utopian excess (and who doesn't, on occasion, let their dreams run away with them?), Peacock was more considerate about the times. Indeed, the times are writ up large in his satirical novels. And Peacock's times — with their best and worse — mirror the promises and threats of our own.
I find the similarities striking. In Peacock's works is chatter about ideas. His characters are not so much characters as we now know them in film and on the modern page, but partisans of different isms. The isms then seem very like our isms now. Marxism was still to come, but capitalism, feminism, Darwinism, romanticism, medievalism as vegetarianism, to say nothing of the Pythagorean diet (as distinct from the angle of the hypotenuse), could sally forth to join the agenda of the debate which the guests at Peacock's sundry castles, abbeys and halls were having with one another.
Over yet another glass of madeira, Peacock's creations prattle on endlessly, albeit indecisively, while their maker quietly mocks them. Such is my taste. Prattle and mock, prattle and mock, suits me fine.
When you recycle the 1990s through Peacock's keyhole, current political manners seem somewhat strange because they are both the same as and different from the rages and fashionable ideas of his time. The arguments we're having now, I regret to inform you, have all been had before.
Dave Riley
[Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) began his career as a novelist with the publication of Headlong Hall in 1815. It was followed by Melincourt, Nightmare Abbey, Maid Marian, The Misfortunes of Elphin, Crotchet Castle and, finally, Gryll Grange in 1860.]