Peacock, Thomas Love
Peacock, Thomas Love (1785–1866). Peacock had modest private means but earned his living as an official in the East India Company. He wrote essays, poetry, plays, and pamphlets, but is best known for his novels, Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), Nightmare Abbey (1818), Crotchet Castle (1831), and Gryll Grange (1860–1). Peacock was a friend of Shelley in his youth and radical in politics, but he grew increasingly independent, and his satirical victims included ardent Romantics as well as ‘march of mind’ men like Henry Brougham. The novels are quirky and an acquired taste, with little plot and much conversation, but offer vignettes of Peacock's contemporaries—Repton (Milestone in Headlong Hall), Malthus (Fax in Melincourt), Coleridge (Flosky in Nightmare Abbey), Shelley (Foster in Headlong Hall).
J. A. Cannon
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Peacock, Thomas Love
