THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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relative luxury and seclusion of country houses where they have the leisure to make fools of themselves. Writing in
1836 on the nature of French comic romance, for which he had a particular relish, Peacock noted that there were ‘two
very distinct classes of comic fictions: one in which the characters are abstractions or embodied classifications, and
the implied or embodied opinions the main matter of the work; another in which the characters are individuals, and
the events and the action those of actual life’. His own satires tend to fall into the first category, based as they are on
speech rather than action, on preoccupation and obsession rather than on psychology and motivation. Despite the
historical setting of both Maid Marion (1822) and The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), all the tales concern themselves
with the ramifications of modern political, social, and aesthetic theory; history proves to be little more than a vehicle
for witty discourses on the nature of government, on monarchy, and on the nature of revolutionary opposition to the
powers that be. As Peacock himself remarks in a Preface to a collection of his first six novels in 1837, his first,
Headlong Hall, had begun with the now defunct Holyhead Mail, and his latest, Crotchet Castle, had ended with an
equally defunct ‘Rotten Borough’. The books had taken up issues of the moment which the passage of time had
rendered dated, but, he hoped, ‘the classes of tastes, feelings and opinions, which were brought into play in these little
tales remain substantially the same’. In many ways Peacock’s own modest analysis of his work is at fault, for his
novels are very much tied to the particular debates of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and even his
‘Victorian’ tale of 1860-1, Gryll Grange, harks back to the mode, the debates, and the gourmandizing clergymen of
his earlier fiction.
Peacock’s intimacy with Shelley, and his acquaintance with the radical speculations of Shelley’s circle, gave him
an amused grasp of both a particular language and an innate inconsistency. His sceptical treatment of leading aspects
of ‘the Spirit of the Age’ nevertheless extends beyond the whims of a radical chic into a general ridicule of the
intellectual posturing of the first third of the nineteenth century. Shelley himself appears under various guises in
Peacock’s early stories, most notably as the crankily esoteric Scythrop Glowry in Nightmare Abbey (1818). He cast
Coleridge as the transcendental Mr Flosky in the same novel, as Moly Mystic in Melincourt (1817) and, belatedly, as
Mr Skionar in Crotchet Castle (1831). The self dramatizing Mr Cypress of Nightmare Abbey is a projection of Byron
and the political renegades, Wordsworth and Southey, are caricatured in Melincourt as Mr Paperstamp and Mr
Feathernest, names which suggest the nature of their profitable association with the State. Melincourt is ambitiously
shaped around an abduction (indirectly derived from both Clarissa and Anna St Ives), but the plot is rendered farcical
by the bizarre introduction of a flute-playing orang-utan as the heroine’s gallant deliverer. ‘Sir Oran Haut-ton’,
educated in all things except speech by the idealistic primitivist Mr Sylvan Forester, is also, thanks to his patron’s
purchase of a seat for him, a Member of Parliament. The rival claims of progress and regress, of
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reform and conservatism, of perfectibilians, deteriorationists, and statu-quo-ites variously figure in all the tales, but
the contrived comic resolutions of the plots, the multiple marriages, the averted suicides, or simply the exposure of
pretence, never effectively serve to resolve the ideological contradictions voiced by the characters. Peacock’s last
novel, Gryll Grange, partly concerns itself with the Victorian debate about the use and misuse of science but unlike
most other mid-nineteenth-century novels it never comes down didactically on one side to the prejudice of another; in
common with Peacock’s other fiction it reveals a genial narrative pleasure in preposterous incident which works more
on the level of entertaining diversion than as an ideological plot device.
Clare and Cobbett
Peacock’s long life extended well into the Victorian period, in marked contrast to many of those whom he had
satirized in his first six novels. Largely because the three major poets of the younger generation — Byron, Shelley,
and Keats — were dead by the late 1820, or because the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott markedly declined
in quality and imaginative energy as the writers grew older, it has often proved difficult to determine precise literary
continuities and influences from the first to the second third of the century, and convenient therefore to cite the
beginnings of new careers (notably those of Carlyle, Dickens, and Tennyson) as evidence of a fresh literary sensibility
in the 1830s. Victorian preoccupations seem to supersede rather than to accentuate the concerns of the 1820s. A
systematic argument over the nature of the gradualist parliamentary and social reform replaced an active involvement
with, or a distaste for, revolutionary politics (though the disruptive fact of the French Revolution continued to haunt
all Victorian political thinking). Relative constitutional stability at home served to enhance the reputation of a