Thomas Love Peacock

Thomas Love Peacock was a linguist, scholar and East India Company official. He had a wide circle of literary friends, including Coleridge and Shelley, and his early works were poems, some of a considerable length....

The focus in Melincourt is the operation of the "rotten borough" which corrupted the English electoral system until the reform bill of 1832. A rotten borough was a constituency that had been established by royal prerogative but had subsequently lost most of its population....

Calidore is a fragment of an unfinished romance and may be considered unique among Peacock's work. The action concerns the adventures of a young man, Calidore, who finds himself in Wales, en route to London in search of "a wife and a philosopher"....

Thomas Love Peacock is today remembered as the author of seven satirical novels which many regard merely as literary curiosities. However, he was also a man of considerable learning, a skilled poet, and an astute literary critic....

A group of highly opinionated individuals gather at a remote country estate in Hampshire and indulge in lengthy conversations about issues of the day over extravagant dinners....

Ebenezer Mac Crotchet, Esq., who has a mixed Scottish and Jewish parentage, has inherited some sterling qualities but is determined to destroy, as much as possible, all vestiges of his extraction....

Unlike most of Peacock's novels, The Misfortunes of Elphin has a distinct plot, built around the adventures of prominent figures of Arthurian legend, like Taliesin, the bard, the princes Elphin, and Seithenyn and King Arthur himself....

Unlike Peacock's other novels, Maid Marian has a substantial plot, based on the romantic legend of Robin Hood. As is usual with Peacock, the violence is presented in a rather humorous fashion and the characters indulge lavishly in eating and drinking....

Headlong Hall was the first of his seven novels, all of which display the same structure. There is a faint semblance of a plot, which is merely a device to bring together a bunch of voluble eccentrics, who converse on a wide range of topical issues....

The melodramatic romance by Goethe The Sorrows of the Young Werther, the story of a troubled aesthete who kills himself for love, was published in 1774 and has since become one of the staples of German literature. Such extravagant productions lend themselves readily to parody....