Peacock, Thomas Love 1785-1866
English novelist and poet

He was born in Weymouth, Dorset, the son of a London merchant, and entered the service of the East India Company in 1819 after producing three satirical romances, Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817) and Nightmare Abbey (1818). Crotchet Castle (1831) concluded this series of satires, and in 1860 Gryll Grange appeared. He also published two romances, Maid Marian (1822) and The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829). The framework of his satirical fictions is always the same - a company of humorists meet in a country house and display the sort of crotchets or prejudices which Peacock, the reasonable man, most disliked: the mechanical sort of political economy, morbid romance, the 'march of science' and transcendental philosophy. The major poets of the Romantic school, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley (one of Peacock's friends), and Robert Southey, are caricatured along with the Edinburgh Reviewers, who offer the extra target of being Scots.

Bibliography: M van Doren, Thomas Love Peacock (1911)