1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Peacock, Thomas Love
PEACOCK, THOMAS LOVE (1785–1866), English novelist and poet, was born at Weymouth on the 18th of October 1785. He was the only son of a London glass merchant, who died soon after the child’s birth. Young Peacock was educated at a private school at Englefield Green, and after a brief experience of business determined to devote himself to literature, while living with his mother (daughter of Thomas Love, a naval man) on their private means. His first books were poetical, The Monks of St Mark (1804), Palmyra (1806), The Genius of the Thames (1810), The Philosophy of Melancholy (1812)—works of no great merit. He also made several dramatic attempts, which were never acted. He served for a short time as secretary to Sir Home Popham at Flushing, and paid several visits to Wales. In 1812 he became acquainted with Shelley. In 1815 he evinced his peculiar power by writing his novel Headlong Hall. It was published in 1816, and Melincourt followed in the ensuing year. During 1817 he lived at Great Marlow, enjoying the almost daily society of Shelley, and writing Nightmare Abbey and Rhododaphne, by far the best of his long poems. In 1819 he was appointed assistant examiner at the India House. Peacock’s nomination appears to have been due to the influence of his old schoolfellow Peter Auber, secretary to the East India Company, and the papers he prepared as tests of his ability were returned with the comment, “Nothing superfluous and nothing wanting.” This was characteristic of the whole of his intellectual work; and equally characteristic of the man was his marriage about this time to Jane Griffith, to whom he proposed by letter, not having seen her for eight years. They had four children, only one of whom, a son, survived his father; one daughter was the first wife of George Meredith. His novel Maid Marian appeared in 1822, The Misfortunes of Elphin in 1829, and Crotchet Castle in 1831; and he would probably have written more but for the death in 1833 of his mother. He also contributed to the Westminster Review and the Examiner. His services to the East India Company, outside the usual official routine, were considerable. He defended it successfully against the attacks of James Silk Buckingham and the Liverpool salt interest, and made the subject of steam navigation to India peculiarly his own. He represented the company before the various parliamentary committees on this question; and in 1839 and 1840 superintended the construction of iron steamers, which not only made the voyage round the Cape successfully, but proved very useful in the Chinese War. He also drew up the instructions for the Euphrates expedition of 1835, subsequently pronounced by its commander, General F. R. Chesney, to be models of sagacity. In 1836 he succeeded James Mill as chief examiner, and in 1856 he retired upon a pension. During his later years he contributed several papers to Fraser’s Magazine, including reminiscences of Shelley, whose executor he was. He also wrote in the same magazine his last novel Gryll Grange (1860), inferior to his earlier writings in humour and vigour, but still a surprising effort for a man of his age. He died on the 23rd of January 1866 at Lower Halliford, near Chertsey, where, so far as his London occupations would allow him, he had resided for more than forty years.
Peacock’s position in English literature is unique. There was nothing like his type of novel before his time; though there might have been if it had occurred to Swift to invent a story as a vehicle for the dialogue of his Polite Conversation. Peacock speaks as well in his own person as through his puppets; and his pithy wit, and sense, combined with remarkable grace and accuracy of natural description, atone for the primitive simplicity of plot and character. Of his seven fictions, Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle are perhaps on the whole the best, the former displaying the most vis comica of situation, the latter the fullest maturity of intellectual power and the most skilful grouping of the motley crowd of “perfectibilians, deteriorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque and lovers of good dinners,” who constitute the dramatis personae of the Peacockian novel. Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin are hardly less entertaining. Both contain descriptive passages of extraordinary beauty. Melincourt is a comparative failure, the excellent idea of an orang-outang mimicking humanity being insufficient as the sole groundwork of a novel. Headlong Hall, though more than foreshadowing the author’s subsequent excellence, is marred by a certain bookish awkwardness characteristic of the recluse student, which reappears in Gryll Grange as the pedantry of an old-fashioned scholar, whose likes and dislikes have become inveterate and whose sceptical liberalism, always rather inspired by hatred of cant than enthusiasm for progress, has petrified into only too earnest conservatism. The book’s quaint resolute paganism, however, is very refreshing in an age eaten up with introspection; it is the kindliest of Peacock’s writings, and contains the most beautiful of his poems, “Years Ago,” the reminiscence of an early attachment. In general the ballads and songs interspersed through his tales are models of exact and melodious diction, and instinct with true feeling. His more ambitious poems are worth little, except Rhododaphne, attractive as a story and perfect as a composition, but destitute of genuine poetical inspiration. His critical and miscellaneous writings are always interesting, especially the restorations of lost classical plays in the Horae dramaticae, but the only one of great mark is the witty and crushing exposure in the Westminster Review of Thomas Moore’s ignorance of the manners and belief he has ventured to portray in his Epicurean. Peacock resented the misrepresentation of his favourite sect, the good and ill of whose tenets were fairly represented in his own person. Somewhat sluggish and self-indulgent, incapable of enthusiasm or self-sacrifice, he yet possessed a deep undemonstrative kindliness of nature; he could not bear to see anyone near him unhappy or uncomfortable; and his sympathy, no less than his genial humour, gained him the attachment of children, dependants, and friends. In official life he was upright and conscientious; his judgment was shrewd and robust. What Shelley justly termed “the lightness, strength and chastity” of his diction secures him an honourable rank among those English writers whose claims to remembrance depend not only upon matter but upon style.
Peacock’s works were collected, though not completely, and published in three volumes in 1875, at the expense of his friend and former protégé, Sir Henry Cole, with an excellent memoir by his granddaughter Mrs Clarke, and a critical essay by Lord Houghton. His prose works were collected by Richard Garnett in ten volumes (1891). Separate novels are included in “Macmillan’s Illustrated Standard Novels,” with introductions by Mr Saintsbury. For an interesting personal notice, see A Poet’s Sketch Book, by R. W. Buchanan (1884). (R. G.)
PEACOCK (Lat. Pavo, O. Eng. Pawe, Du. pauuw, Ger. Pfau, Fr. Paon), the bird so well known from the splendid plumage of the male, and as the proverbial personification of pride. It is a native of the Indian peninsula and Ceylon, in some parts of which it is very abundant. Setting aside its importation to Palestine by Solomon (1 Kings x. 22; 2 Chron. ix. 21), its assignment in classical mythology as the favourite bird of Hera testifies to the early acquaintance the Greeks must have had with it; but, though it is mentioned by Aristophanes and other older writers, their knowledge of it was probably very slight until after the conquests of Alexander. Throughout all succeeding time, however, it has never very freely rendered itself to domestication, and, though in earlier days highly esteemed for the table,[1] it is no longer considered the delicacy it was once thought; the young of the wild birds are, however, still esteemed in the East.
Japan or “black-shouldered” Peafowls.
As in most cases of domestic animals, pied or white varieties of the ordinary peacock, Pavo cristatus, are not infrequently to be seen, and they are valued as curiosities. Greater interest, however, attends what is known as the Japanese or Japan peacock, a form which has received the name of P. nigripennis, as though it were a distinct species. In this form the cock, besides other less conspicuous differences, has all the upper wing coverts of a deep lustrous blue instead of being mottled with brown and white, while the hen is of a more or less grizzled-white. It “breeds true”, but occasionally a presumably pure stock of birds of the usual coloration throws out one or more having the Japan plumage. It is to be observed that the male has in the coloration of the parts mentioned no little resemblance to that of the second indubitably good species, the P. muticus (or P. spicifer of some writers) of Burma and java, though the character of the latter’s crest—the feathers of which are barbed along their whole length instead of at the tip only—and its golden-green neck and breast furnish a ready means of distinction. Sir R. Heron was confident that the Japan breed had arisen in England within his memory,[2] and C. Darwin (Animals and Plants under Domestication, i. 290–292) was inclined to believe it only a variety; but its abrupt appearance, which rests on indisputable evidence, is most suggestive in the light that it may one day throw on the question of evolution as exhibited in the origin of “species.” It should be stated that the Japan bird is not known to exist anywhere as a wild race, though apparently kept in Japan. The accompanying illustration is copied from a plate drawn by J. Wolf, given in D. G. Elliot’s Monograph of the Phasianidae.
The peafowls belong to the group Gallinae, from the normal members of which they do not materially differ in structure; and, though by some systematists they are raised to the rank of a family, Pavonidae, most are content to regard them as a sub-family of Phasianidae (Pheasant, q.v.). Akin to the genus Pavo is Polyplectrum, of which the males are armed with two or more spurs on each leg, and near them is generally placed the genus Argusianus, containing the argus-pheasants, remarkable for their wonderfully ocellated plumage, and the extraordinary length of the secondary quills of their wings, as well as of the tail-feathers. It must always be remembered that the so-called “tail” of the peacock is formed not by the rectrices or true tail-feathers, but by the singular development of the tail-coverts. (A. N.)
PEAK, THE, a high table-land in the north of Derbyshire, England, included in the Pennine range of hills. The name, however, is extended, without definite limits, to cover the whole of the hilly district north of Buxton. The table-land reaches an elevation of 2088 ft. in Kinder Scout. The geological formation is millstone-grit, and the underlying beds are not domed, but cup-shaped, dipping inward from the flanks of the mass. The summit is a peaty moorland, through which masses of rock project at intervals. The name of this high plateau has from the 17th century been identified with “peak,” the pointed or conical top of a mountain, but the very early references to the district and certain places in it show clearly, as the New English Dictionary points out, that this connexion is unwarranted. The name appears in the Old English Chronicle (924) as Péaclond, of the district governed from the castle of Peveril of the Peak (see Derbyshire), and also in the name of the cavern under the hill at Castleton, Péac’s Arse. Péac, it has been suggested, is the name of a local deity or demon, and possibly may be indentified with Puck. For the etymology of “peak,” point, &c., and its variants or related words, “pick” and “pike,” see Pike.
PEALE, CHARLES WILLSON (1741–1826), American portrait painter, celebrated especially for his portraits of Washington, was born in Queen Anne county, Maryland, on the 16th of April 1741. During his infancy the family removed to Chestertown, Kent county, Maryland, and after the death of his father (a country schoolmaster) in 1750 they removed to Annapolis. Here, at the age of 13, he was apprenticed to a saddler. About 1764 he began seriously to study art. He got some assistance from Gustavus Hesselius, a Swedish portrait painter then living near Annapolis, and from John Singleton Copley in Boston; and in 1767–1770 he studied under Benjamin West in London. In 1770 he opened a studio in Philadelphia, and met with immediate success. In 1772, at Mount Vernon, Peale painted a three-quarters-length study of Washington (the earliest known portrait of him), in the uniform of a colonel of Virginia militia. This canvas is now in the Lee Memorial Chapel of Washington and Lee University. He painted various other portraits of Washington; probably the best known in a full-length, which was made in 1778, and of which Peale made many copies. This portrait had been ordered by the Continental Congress, which, however, made no appropriation for it, and eventually it was bought for a private collection in Philadelphia. Peale painted two miniatures of Mrs Washington (1772 and 1777), and portraits of many of the famous men of the time, a number of which are in Independence Hall, Philadelphia. His portraits of Washington do not appeal so strongly to Americans as do those of Gilbert Stuart, but his admitted skill as a draughtsman gives to all of his work considerable historical value. Peale removed to
- ↑ Classical authors contain many allusions to its high appreciation at the most sumptuous banquets; and medieval bills of fare on state occasions nearly always include it. In the days of chivalry one of the most solemn oaths was taken “on the peacock,” which seems to have been served up garnished with its gaudy plumage.
- ↑ A. Newton himself regarded this as probably incorrect.