Thomas Love Peacock Research Articles

Culture and the Middle Classes: Popular Knowledge in Industrial Manchester

God bless my soul, sir … I am all out of patience with the march of mind. Here has my house been nearly burnt down, by my cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract, published by the Steam Intellect Society, and written by a learned friend who is for doing all the world's business as well as his own, and is equally well qualified to handle every branch of human knowledge. [Thomas Love Peacock—Crotchet Castle (1831)]The diffusion of knowledge preoccupied middle-class elites in early industrial England. While factory production promised a future of material abundance, an unsettled and menacing social environment threatened this vision of endless progress. Education constituted a cornerstone of the liberal creed embraced by the industrial middle class, and diffusing knowledge offered the hope of raising up the “lower orders” to social responsibility and respectability. A properly arranged distribution of knowledge held out hope for an ordered and orderly social existence.But the diffusion of knowledge meant more than simply uplifting the working class. Its significance extends beyond the problematic historical question of “social control.” An utterly new society was rising in the industrializing urban agglomerations of provincial England. An expanding middle class of businessmen and professionals claimed this world as its own. They pursued political power on both local and national stages and fought for reform in economic and social policy. A strongly felt sense of stewardship prompted the industrial middle class to devote great resources and energies to shaping the new urban environment.

A New "Little Book" by Thomas Love Peacock

A New "Little Book" by Thomas Love Peacock

Thomas Love Peacock's Crotchet Castle: Reconciling the Spirits of the Age

E in none of his works did he ever seriously contemplate settling the great and and interesting controversies' he discusses, Thomas Love Peacock has often been criticized for failing to do just that; and in no case, perhaps, has the criticism been more pointed than that directed at Crotchet Castle (1831). Marilyn Butler complains of endlessly incomplete conversation and concludes that Peacock's meaning remains remarkably unclear in this novel, while Carl Dawson calls its debates, which are so integral to Peacock's novels of talk, mock Socratic dialogues without a guiding Socrates. Putting the most explicit case, Douglas Hewitt decides that there is no intellectually formulated resolution of conflicting ideas in

It Has Been Said

IT HAS BEEN SAID* and collected by NORMAN PASKINi "To try to map our tomorrows with the help ofdata supplied by our yesterdays means ignoring the basic element of the future which is its complete nonexistence ."—Vladimir Nabokov "Credibility is an expanding field. . . . Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight."—Tom Stoppard "Logic is a tool. . . . and a tool alone does nothing. It has to have a point of leverage and a guiding hand."—Stanislaw Lem "If anyone asks, What is culture? Who is cultured? the needle points, by an extraordinary coincidence, in the direction of ourselves."—C. P. Snow "There is great difference betwixt the being able to make experiments and the being able to give a philosophical account of them."—Robert Boyle "Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived."—Jonathan Swift "Most ofhuman sentences are aimed at getting rid of the ambiguity which you unfortunately left trailing in the last sentence."—Jacob Bronowski "Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant."—Lewis Carroll " 'My project,' he told us, 'is to learn where to go by discovering where I am by reviewing where I've been.' "—John Barth "Mathematics and death are never in error."—Yvgeney Zamyatin ?Material appearing under this tide is collected with the aim of making the serious a bit less serious, the ponderous a bit less heavy, and the reading hours a bit more fun. We invite you to share a collection of your humorous treasures with PBM readers. tAddress: Backershagen 27, 1082 GR Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Perspectives in Biology andMedicine ¦ Spring 1979 | 359 "His heart and soul were at the end of his pen, and they got into the ink."— Rudyard Kipling "If a man were to rummage in his past, he'd find material in it for a whole set of lives."—Karel Capek "Ask yourself what you remember from the last articles and books you read, beyond their titles and, perhaps, an idea or two—that, and a sense of time spent in reading."—Ronald Christ "I am sorry to find you participating in the vulgar error of the reading public, to whom an unusual collocation of words, involving a juxtaposition of antiperistatical ideas, immediately suggests the notion of hyperoxysophistical paradoxology."—Thomas Love Peacock "It is venturesome to suggest that a co-ordination of words can resemble the universe very much."—Jorge Luis Borges "Philosophy has a fine saying for everything—for death it has an entire set."—Laurence Sterne "I noticed, with respect to experiments, that they became more necessary the more one is advanced in knowledge."—René Descartes "In these modern times, you are damn nothing unless you can produce statistics . Columns and columns of figures, readings and percentages. Where would we be if we couldn't produce our certified statistics?"—"Flann O'Brien" (Brian O'Nolan) "Always, in our trade, look a gift horse at both ends and in the middle. He may throw you."—Rudyard Kipling "How often language is the cloak with which a man conceals, not his thought, but his want of thought."—Robert Louis Stevenson "Nothing annoys me so much in the stupid as that they are better pleased with themselves than any reasonable person has a right to be."—Michel de Montaigne "Journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive."—G. K. Chesterton " 'Kismet', i.e. fate—if at all anything, and as potent as suspected for centuries—is a dam' baffling thing!"—G. V. Desani "Ifthe Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon the Creation, I should have recommended something simpler."—Alphonso X of Castile 360 Norman Paskin ¦ It Has Been Said ...

Major/Minor: A Symposium

When I put to my literary friends the question How would you place Ivy Compton-Burnett?, I find that most of them regard her as one of those literary sports, with no real antecedents and no real successors, that from time to time thrust themselves up in the neat flower-beds of English fiction. (Thomas Love Peacock, Ronald Firbank, T. F. Powys, and Henry Green are the obvious examples. Some might even add Laurence Sterne.) In short, she is for such people a minor and peripheral figure but of a kind that often survives long after major and central figures have been swept into oblivion by the winds of time.

From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment

“He (Adam Smith) wanted to show how from being a savage, (man) rose to be a Scotchman.” (Walter Bagehot)The Rev. Dr. Folliott:“Pray, Mr. MacQuedy, how is it that all gentlemen of your nation begin everything they write with the ‘infancy of society?’”(Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle)The purpose of this essay is to consider an intellectual method which enjoyed a considerable vogue among the philosophes of Scotland. This method, ‘conjectural history,’ appears to be the direct or indirect source of many of the schemes of social evolution so popular in the nineteenth century, but it has itself been little investigated, and often misunderstood by assimilation to its progeny.I. The Nature of Conjectural History‘Conjectural history’ was, it seems, first distinguished from the more conventional narrative form of history by Dugald Stewart. He remarked on its use in the writings of Adam Smith, but the sort of inquiry to which we find Stewart referring is a method for understanding social phenomena which was characteristic of a whole group of Scottish writers, and we may take what he tells us about Smith as preliminary identification of the method.Stewart explained conjectural history as arising out of comparisons between “our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, manners and institutions, [and] those which prevail among rude tribes” (whether of the past or the present). Such comparisons, he claimed, cannot fail to raise the question “by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated.”

The Aerial View of Parnassus (Literature as Objective Knowledge)

In I820, Thomas Love Peacock published a clever piece of literary paradox entitled Four Ages of Poetry, in which he contrived to work off his irritation some contemporary poets by arguing mocking plausibility with progress of reason and civilization, facts become more interesting than fiction' and for this reason poetry falls into desuetude and decay, its illusions dissipated by the sciences of morals and mind in their advance to perfection. We know, Peacock tells us, that there are no Dryads in Hyde-park nor Naiads in Regent's-canal,2 poetry must be remote from our ordinary perceptions and while historian and natural philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, progress of knowledge, poet is wallowing in rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for grown babies of age.3 An era of intellectual maturity (like nineteenth century) could broadmindedly allow poetry had been: the mental rattle awakened attention of intellect in infancy of civil society,4 but successive ages of increased enlightenment had made it clear 'intellectual power, or intellectual acquisition' had 'turned themselves into other and better channels'. Mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians and political economists had built into upper air of intelligence a pyramid,5 from summit of which they could survey negligible modern Parnassus beneath them. Let me repeat in I820 this assault on poetry was ironic and flippant, just as praise accorded to science, philosophy and social science, all of which Peacock profoundly distrusted, was ironic and flippant. But I wonder how many modern readers, settling to read Four Ages of Poetry, would now be sensitive to its satire. As early as 1825 Macaulay was gravely asserting: We think as civilization advances poetry almost necessarily declines,6 and Spencer, Huxley and a host of earnest promoters of what Peacock had called solid and conducive studies succeeded in turning satirist's mockery into a solemn climate of opinion prevails to this day. A year or two ago, spell of Saint Valentine's Day took possession of a B.B.C. television team which went into streets of London to way-lay a sample of passers-by three questions: (I) What are poets like? (2) Can you name any poem? (3) Can you recite any lines of poetry? Vacuous 'don't knows' apart, there was some consensus poets had long hair and were either sickly or effeminate or both. Most of those interviewed could in fact give title of one poem; several could recite a line, or even two or three lines of verse (usually beginning of Wordsworth's 'Daffodils'), though no one was equal to any kind of sustained quotation. Clearly, man literally in street could hardly have known less or cared less about poetry, Saint Valentine's Day or not; and I suspect, without at all adopting severe standard of (say) Dr. Leavis as to what is acceptably to be called poetry, interviewers would not have fared conspicuously better if they'd concentrated on a cross-section of students in higher education.7

'A Dialogue on Idealities': An Unpublished Manuscript of Thomas Love Peacock

Among the letters and literary manuscripts of Thomas Love Peacock in the 'Broughton Papers' acquired by the British Museum in 1950, there is an unpublished holograph manuscript entitled 'A Dialogue on Idealities' (Add. MS 47225, ff. I93-207). This is not an entirely new work, as the title might suggest, but a revised and expanded version of the untitled draft (Add. MS 36815, ff. I9I-200) published as 'A Dialogue on Friendship after Marriage' in an appendix to the Halliford Edition of Peacock's Works.l The dialogue, in both versions, is essentially a debate between two married women on the question 'whether a married man or woman may love in a third person the qualities in which the legitimate partner is deficient'. And in both versions a third woman, evidently a mutual acquaintance, appears in the course of the discussion to arbitrate between them. A late work, probably written shortly after Gryll Grange (I86o), 'A Dialogue on Idealities' is interesting not only as a reflection of Peacock's views on love and marriage but as the only formal dialogue by an author who made extensive use of direct dialogue in his fiction. Although it is preserved with Peacock's letters to his friend John Cam Hobhouse, Baron Broughton, the manuscript of 'A Dialogue on Idealities' is not mentioned in their extant correspondence, and it may have been presented to Broughton's daughter Charlotte (I831-1914), who was married in 1854 to Dudley Wilmot Carleton, afterwards fourth Baron Dorchester (I822-97).2 A brief note in Mrs Carleton's hand on the title-page (signed 'C.D.C.' and therefore written before 1875, when she became Lady Dorchester) merely states that the unsigned manuscript was by Peacock and 'given to me', but this would seem to imply that it was given to her by Peacock himself rather than by her father. Peacock had been particularly fond of Lord Broughton's daughters as children, and there is every reason to believe that he remained on familiar terms with 'Chattie' Hobhouse after she reached womanhood. We know, for example, that she occasionally corresponded with him both before and after her marriage, and that at least once, in August 1857, she spent several days with him at Lower Halliford.3

Poetry as Fiction: Meredith's Modern Love

Modern Love is a curiosity of Victorian literature, an oddity among Victorian poems and even among Meredith's own. For despite the rich, dense imagery, the self-sufficiency of many of the individual stanzas (which stand well by themselves in anthologies), and the paucity and obliquity of narration (the latter a characteristic of Meredith's fiction too), it is in a very real sense novelistic. It treats a poetic theme which had fascinated Meredith among many others in the nineteenth century-the fatal woman, la belle dame sans merci-in terms of the psychological realism, the awareness of social context, and above all the temporal development of personal relationships that characterize the Victorian novel in general and Meredith's novels in particular. It tells its story in heightened poetic language, as a sequence of intense emotions, but its intensity is continually undercut by ironic self-awareness and its extreme subjectivity is always sharply responsive to the reality of others. The narrator at the beginning is nearly indistinguishable from the maddened husband, but at the end he is wise, aloof, omniscient. Modern Love is a point of intersection between Victorian poetry and the Victorian novel, and definitively marks Meredith's transition from poet to novelist. Meredith's first book was Poems, (1851). During the 1850's he wrote poetry, two odd works of prose fiction-The Shaving of Shagpat (1856) and Farina (1857), and then his first novels, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and Evan Harrington (1860). After Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, published in 1862 but containing much that had been written in the preceding decade, he wrote mostly novels. The shift was no doubt ultimately determined by his talents and influenced by his need for money, but it seems to have been precipitated by an experience that shed new and disagreeable light on two recurrent subjects of the poetry and fiction he had written so far: innocent nature and love, and fatal or fallen women. In 1849 he had married Mary Nicolls, the widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock; a son was born in 1853; in 1856 or '57 she went off with a Pre-Raphaelite painter, Henry Wallis, to whom she bore a child in 1858; she died in 1861,

Thomas Love Peacock on Sir Robert Peel: An Unpublished Satire

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and DocumentsThomas Love Peacock on Sir Robert Peel: An Unpublished SatireNicholas A. JoukovskyNicholas A. Joukovsky Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 73, Number 1Aug., 1975 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/390621 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1975 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

William Blake; Blake's 'Jo': A Commentary; New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth; Thomas Love Peacock; The Last Face: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts; The Tradition of Romantic Morality; Striving Towards Wholeness

William Blake; Blake's 'Jo': A Commentary; New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth; Thomas Love Peacock; The Last Face: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts; The Tradition of Romantic Morality; Striving Towards Wholeness

The Auburn Syndrome: Change and Loss in "The Deserted Village" and Wordsworth's Grasmere

Several years before Thomas Love Peacock confronted perfectibilian Mr. Forster with degenerationist Mr. Escot, in Headlong Hall, William Wordsworth addressed his Letter to Mathetes to question of c assumed inferiority of present age in moral dignity and intellectual power to those which have preceded it.'This was a subject that Wordsworth, no less than Shelley (the original of Mr. Forster) chose to analyze optimistically. He begins by condemning as specious opposition of a modern period c half a century at most to the whole of recorded time before it. By so construing history we imagine obstacles to exist out of ourselves to retard our progress and a despair results which makes progress more difficult. Wordsworth claims that progress in species is not direct like a Roman road but may be justly compared to that of a river, which, both in its smaller reaches and larger turnings, is frequently forced back towards its fountains by objects which cannot otherwise be eluded or overcome. What seems to be regression is actually a gathering of energy from an original source which c contributes as effectually to further [the river] in its course, as when it moves forward uninterrupted in a line . (p. 90). It is this metaphor (not logic) which leads Wordsworth to another complaint in his correspondent's letter: difficulty of knowing and following Truth in these degenerate times. Wordsworth responds by employing another circular metaphor. The youth, Mathetes, must be remanded to nature if he would escape corruption by world. c He cannot recall past time, Wordsworth continues, c he cannot begin his journey afresh sacred light of childhood is and must be for him no more than

His Fine Wit: A Study of Thomas Love Peacock

His Fine Wit: A Study of Thomas Love Peacock

Headlong into Gryll Grange or Peacock Alley Revisited

Despite the seductions of the Institute for the leisure of the theory classes any historian worth his grants knows literature to be an indispensable source. How much would we know about the England of Gloriana, of Anne, of Victoria, without Shakespeare, the Spectator, and “Locksley Hall?” A lot no doubt, but how much poorer we should be without them. Not to overdo chivalry the pages that follow view Jeremy Bentham's England through the spectacles of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) whose place as a novelist may unsafely be left to those undertakers of reputations, the professors of literature, but whose value as a document may best be gauged by a historian. Indeed Peacock is a historian, the better for being a satirist. Whether all historians are satirists must be decided by others, but surely all satirists are historians. Compared to parliamentary papers, mercantile ledgers, the Benthamite corpus, Peacock's slim volumes may seem to afford an historian no more than a trial run. Yet such is far from the case. The problem for the initiate is not paucity but riches. The shafts of his satire leave scarcely a contemporary fad or fancy in darkness. What is more, it takes very little sensitivity to appreciate how brightly those shafts light up many posturings of our own day. The words, “for the initiate,” are deliberately chosen: to capture Peacock's flavor one must comprehend his intellectual milieu. To this area there is no better key than contemporary periodicals wherein the words, the phrases, often the very rhythms find echo in his novels. Having absorbed the first, one grasps the second, one understands what Peacock was saying when he knows what was being talked about when he said it.

Thomas Love Peacock

Journal Article Thomas Love Peacock Get access Notes and Queries, Volume CXCVIII, Issue sep, 1 September 1953, Page 410, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/CXCVIII.sep.410 Published: 01 September 1953

Meredith and Goethe

Why was George Meredith, like so many of the Victorian philosophes, reticent about the sources of his philosophy? Perhaps he believed that his idea of nature was his own creation; or perhaps he felt that he had indicated his teacher (or teachers) clearly enough for posterity. Whatever was the case, his silence has aroused much speculation. Tennyson has been named as the inspiration of the sentimental spiritualism in Meredith's early nature poems; Mary (Peacock Nicolls) Meredith has been given credit for his belief in the spirituality of love and for his courageous outlook on life; the Moravian brothers of Neuwied and Thomas Love Peacock have been suggested as possible sources of Meredith's altruism; R. H. Horne and Wordsworth have been mentioned as contributors to the poet's embryonic nature philosophy; and even Shelley, James Thomson, and August Comte have received their due for influencing Meredith in the early years of his life. All these hypotheses, it is true, are supported by the idea of nature that one finds in Meredith's poems. However, it seems to me that if one takes all these suggestions into account one must assume that Meredith's philosophy of nature was a patched-up conception. There is no evidence in Meredith's poetry to justify that assumption.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Halliford Edition of the Works of Thomas Love Peacock. London: Constable & Co., Ltd. Vols. 2–5, 1924. (Vol. II: Melincourt. Vol. III: Nightmare Abbey; Maid Marian. Vol. IV: The Misfortunes of Elphin; Crotchet Castle. Vol. V: Gryll Grange.) Ten volumes, nine guineas net. R. W. CHAPMAN R. W. CHAPMAN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume I, Issue 2, April 1950, Pages 239–242, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/I.2.239 Published: 01 April 1950

"George Eliot" Reviewed George Eliot Gerald Bullett

WHEN Eliot died, Lord Acton ranked her second only to Shakespeare. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our civilisation, or if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, he wrote, George Eliot might have had a rival. Though few of his contemporaries were so extravagant in their praise, none, I think, would have predicted so complete an eclipse as her reputation suffered during the next fifty years. The generation of the First World War was ripe for Samuel Butler and it could enjoy Trollope, but it could not stomach Eliot. Her subtle analysis of temptation had no significance in a world where there was no such thing as sin; her relentless insistence on the law of consequences bored those who no longer believed consequences inevitable. Man seemed fairly set to control the universe; he had created a planned economy, with controlled production, controlled distribution, controlled currency; with new scientific techniques from birth control to flood control he would shape consequences to suit himself. It is not surprising that the height of this confidence in the i930's coincided with the lowest ebb of Eliot's reputation. The English Novelists (i936), a composite survey from Chaucer to Joyce by twenty contemporary writers, which devoted a whole chapter to Thomas Love Peacock, deliberately omitted Eliot as one who had made no innovations of any significance in the writing of prose fiction. During the Second World War, however, many people, finding time to read the books they had too lightly passed over, revised their opinions of Eliot. The appreciation of discriminating critics who had acknowledged her greatness-Thomas Seccombe,

Thomas Love Peacock's 'Maid Marian'

Thomas Love Peacock's 'Maid Marian'

Thomas Taylor, Platonist of the Romantic Period

A careful student of the Romantic poets will soon or late encounter the name of Thomas Taylor, whose chief claim to importance is that he was an extraordinarily diligent scholar and the first translator into English of all Plato's works. An inquirer will find brief and not always accurate accounts of this man in several encyclopedias; he will discover that certain nineteenth-century antiquarians wrote a number of sketches of Taylor in which fact is liberally sprinkled with fiction; and finally, he will come upon half a dozen more recent articles of a scholarly nature, including an almost complete bibliography of Taylor's books, three papers suggesting rather doubtful parallels between some passages of these and certain poems of Blake and Wordsworth, one which reprints from manuscript sources a few of Taylor's own poems, and another which endeavors unsuccessfully to demonstrate an acquaintance between Taylor and Shelley. Taylor's various translations and original works have also been cited occasionally in studies such as Professor Lowes's The Road to Xanadu. But with all this array of scholarship, imposing when it is called forth by a man so obscure as Thomas Taylor, there is still no comprehensive or accurate account of the man himself and his work. He is important, however, as the most energetic exponent of Platonism in England between the Cambridge Platonists and Benjamin Jowett, this at a time when Platonism once more became significant in literature after the eighteenth-century dismissal of Plato. Yet before we have a study of Taylor's Platonism in its relation to that of the Romantic poets, we should have a reasonably trustworthy biography of the man. For although it will not be found that Thomas Taylor was a person of hitherto unrecognized and startling importance for the student of literature, it is certain that he was known to such people as James Boswell, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Wollstonecraft, probably William Blake, and quite possibly Shelley; that his books were read by Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Emerson in America; and that he was a conspicuous figure in the intellectual world of England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since the available accounts of him are incomplete and contradictory, he deserves the services of a biographer who will simply collect and set forth the facts.