Peacock, THOMAS LOVE, satirist, was born at Weymouth on 18th October 1785, the only child of a London merchant, who died three years afterwards. His boyhood was passed at Chertsey, and for six and a half years he was sent to a private school on Englefield Green, but from thirteen he was self-educated, growing up an accomplished scholar. The chief events of his uneventful life were the loss of his first love (1808); his under-secretaryship to Sir Home Popham on a warship at Flushing (1808-9); his close friendship with Shelley, whom he first met in Wales in 1812, during one of his many walking tours; his employment from 1819 to 1856 in the office of the East India Company, as clerk, correspondent, and chief examiner; his marriage in 1820 to the 'Beauty of Carnarvonshire,' who bore him one son and three daughters, and died in 1852 after twenty-six years of ill-health; and the important part he bore in the introduction of iron steamships to Eastern waters (1832-40). In 1823 he had taken a cottage for his mother at Halliford on the Thames, and here he died, aged eighty, on 23d January 1866.
Peacock's literary activity extended over more than half a century. Of his half-dozen booklets of verse, published between 1804 and 1837, the best, Rhododaphne, offers nothing so good as some of the gay lyrics scattered throughout his seven 'novels'—Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), Nightmare Abbey (1818; its hero is Shelley), Mail Marian (1822), The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), Crotchet Castle (1831), and Gryll Grange (1860). And these 'novels' are interesting chiefly as a study of character—the author's own. A Rabelaisian pagan of the 18th century, egoistic, protean, such was Thomas Love Peacock, and in Thomas Love Peacock we have the Alpha and Omega of his writings. They mirror his likings (for nature, music, the classics, madeira, and good living generally), and his stronger, if exaggerated, dislikes (for field-sports, reviewers, political economy, all things Scotch and American, and, above all, Lord Brougham). They leave on one the impression that the little he did not know was to his mind not worth knowing, that because, for example, he had not been at a university and was not religious, therefore Oxbridge and heaven were beyond his microcosm. They may still find admirers in the cultured few, but the steely wit and erudition of their dialogues can never touch the great heart of the people. They are—trite though it sound—'caviare to the general.'
See Sir Henry Cole's collected edition of Peacock's works, with a preface by Lord Houghton and a memoir by his granddaughter (3 vols. 1875); Dr Garnett's edition (10 vols. 1891-92); also an article by Spedding in the Edinburgh Review for July 1875, and one by Mr Gosse in vol. iv. of Ward's English Poets (2d ed. 1883).