Peacock, Thomas Love (1785–1866)

Abstract

Thomas Love Peacock, like his own life-span, fits into no literary category. He began as the friend of Shelley, and ended as the father-in-law of Meredith; he was a man of business who, as Chief Examiner at the East India Office, was at the top of the vast concern which Charles Lamb, as a clerk there, characterised as ‘South Sea House’. He kept his private and public life reticently apart from his literary self, using in his writing only the figures, fads and idiosyncrasies of the major Romantics as the material for his witty, humorous, unmalicious and compact body of prose fiction.