Wearing many feathers to his literary cap, Thomas Love Peacock was a satiric novelist, poet, essayist, and opera critic. His writing was mostly set in Victorian England. In 1800, while working at a merchant house in London, Peacock wrote Palmyra, his first collection of poems.
England’s street life and landscape was well documented in The Genius of the Thames (1810). A completely unrelated arena was the use of grammar as a setting for his next play Sir Hornbook (1813), subtitled A Grammatico-Allegorical Ballad. It was meant for children, teaching them how to use grammar correctly - but written in a fun learning approach.
Peacock's novels were satires. Headlong Hall questioned and made fun of the free love, vegetarianism and inconclusive debates that he had witnessed in Bracknell. The novel was regarded as daring in the safe and veiled society of that time, often making farcical situations funnier by describing them with delicate precision, as in the following.
In 1817, Peacock's second satirical novel, Melincourt, was published. In this, he introduces someone called Sir Oran Haut-Ton, an orangutan, who was more successful than many of his human companions, but of course, was unable to speak. He had bought himself a baronetcy and planned to get himself and his joint candidate, Mr Sarcastic, into Parliament by buying votes in the rotten borough of Onevote. So by carrying accepted conventions to their absurd conclusions, Peacock was demonstrating the evils of corruption and, in effect, appealing for political reform. "A corrupt administration estimates conscience and Stilton cheese by the same criterion, that its rottenness was its recommendation."
Peacock uses debate and conversation between characters to satirise many contemporary topics, such as the first use of paper money. Through his novels, his ideas of the government were put forward to the public, the readers. This was radical for the time when any criticism of the Government was severely repressed.
In retirement he produced a lengthy poem, Newark Abbey, ten articles in Fraser's magazine (including his memoirs of Shelley) and one last satirical novel, Gryll Grange. He was friends with Thomas Marlow and Percy Shelley throughout his lifetime.
Alongside his literary career, Peacock was employed as an official of the East India Company and supervised the construction of the first ships to sail to India powered exclusively by steam.
Adapted from Marlow Society
The Monks of St. Mark was written and published in 1804. It displays the characteristics of his later manner, and is a genuine Peacockian ballad.
The Monks of St. Mark, a rollicking ballad in the anapestic measure of Browning’s I sprang to the stirrup. Extending to some eighty or ninety lines, it is an account of drinking and reeling, falling and bawling ghostly brothers, and would give complete satisfaction to the most furious anti - teetotaller. It is extremely youthful.
'Tis midnight: the sky is with clouds overcast;
The forest-trees bend in the loud-rushing blast;
The rain strongly beats on these time-hallow'd spires;
The lightning pours swiftly its blue-pointed fires;
Triumphant the tempest-fiend rides in the dark,
And howls round the old abbey-walls of St. Mark!
Adapted from poetry analysis site.
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