Thomas Love Peacock is not much remembered these days, at least outside Tasmania, where he has an official appreciation society.
Even there, the passion seems to be a slow burner. The society held its first Peacock conference in Hobart five years ago; and according to the website, it hopes to organise another "some time in 2010". But then, in fairness to Tasmania, Peacock was English: born in Weymouth in 1785 and living most of his life in London. So such as it is, the Australian state's devotion is beyond the call of duty.
Part of the challenge in promoting him is that he never made much of an effort himself. His novels were first published anonymously and, with a good career, he didn't need the income from writing. Certainly he made few concessions to the popular taste of the early 1800s for things such as plots.
His early novels even appeared without prefaces until, in 1837, he relented. "An old friend assures me that to publish a book without a preface is like entering a drawing-room without making
a bow," he wrote then. "In deference to this opinion, though I am not quite clear of its soundness, I make my prefatory bow at this eleventh hour."
Another problem is that the work was relentlessly intellectual, using characters only to argue points (typically over a fine dinner). Their reliance on dialogue notwithstanding, the books also had extensive footnotes. Despite considering himself lazy, Peacock was extremely erudite and insisted on sharing his research.
On top of all this, he was a satirist. In one of his novels, for example, an orang-utan becomes an MP. But that dramatic flourish aside, his writings are full of references to contemporary events, which diminish their appeal now. Not that his general themes have dated so badly.
In that same preface, he suggests that little has changed since he wrote his first books, and that little is likely to: "The array of false pretensions, moral, political, and literary, is as imposing as ever: the rulers of the world still feel things in their effects, and never foresee them in their causes; and political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums and practise legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude; following, like the 'learned friend' of Crotchet Castle, a course as tortuous as that of a river, but in a reverse process; beginning by being dark and deep, and ending by being transparent." And yet for all this, in real life, Peacock was a warm and thoroughly human individual. He loved learning. But here he is in a letter to his friend Shelley, explaining how the "brilliant summer" of 1818 is just not conducive to work:
"The mere pleasure of existence in the open air is too absorbing for the energies of active thought, and too attractive for that resolute perseverance in sedentary study to which I find the long and dreary winter so propitious. . .I devote the forenoon to writing; the afternoon to the river, the woods, and classical poetry; the evening to philosophy. . ." And for all his intellectualising, Peacock was also a passionate man. We know, because he immortalised it in verse, that exactly 200 years ago he was deeply in love. Thereafter the plot thickened, in his life if not his novels, and the lovers were parted, first by the malign influence of an unnamed other, and then by death.
This is how an introduction to a posthumous Victorian publication of one of his novels referred to the events: ". . .in 1807 [ Peacock] is found engaged to a young lady not named, whom in the summer of that year he used to meet in the ruins of Newark Abbey, about eight miles from Chertsey.
"The interviews were apparently clandestine, else it is difficult to imagine how 'the underhand interference of a third person', probably exercised in intercepting letters, could have led the young lady to suppose herself deserted, and bestow her hand elsewhere with a precipitancy only to be paralleled by her exit from this mortal scene in the following year.
"Something probably remains untold. Whatever reason for reproach Peacock may have had, her memory remained as a tender possession with him to the last hour of his life." Indeed, Peacock was still guarding the memory 35 years later when he wrote Newark Abbey. The poem is subtitled "August 1842, with a remembrance of August 1807", and it opens thus: "The sunbeams play, the breezes stir,/ Unseen, unfelt, unheard by her/ Who, on that long-past August day/ Beheld with me these ruins grey."
Before we go any further with it, we should note that his grief had not prevented him marrying in the interim, in 1820. He remained married until his wife too exited the mortal scene in 1852. But it must have been hard for her while she was mortal to compete with her dead rival. And while we are told that he honoured his wife with an "affecting Latin epitaph", Peacock stayed faithful to his first love till the end.
He always wore a locket with a piece of her hair, and only a few days before his own death, spoke of having repeated dreams in which they were reunited. That was in 1866, when Peacock finally learned the answer to the question implied in the opening lines of Newark Abbey's last verse:
"Whatever span the fates allow/ Ere I shall be as she is now,/ Still in my bosom's inmost cell/ Shall that long-treasured memory dwell,/ That, more than language can express,/ Pure miracle of loveliness / Whose voice so sweet, whose eyes so bright/ Were my soul's music and its light;/ In those blest days when life was new,/ And hope was false, but love was true."