Crotchet Castle: "A book that furnishes no quotations is no book - it is a plaything."

Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock

Thomas Love Peacock was born on October 18th 1785 in Weymouth, Dorset.

His education was never completed and mainly self-taught Thomas was made a clerk with Ludlow Fraser Company, merchants in the City of London. In 1800

For Thomas life was work and the nurturing of his writing. When time allowed he would visit the Reading Room of the British Museum to study classic literature.

In 1804 and 1806 he published two volumes of poetry, The Monks of St. Mark and Palmyra. By 1809 he has also published his great poem ‘The Genius of the Thames’.

Peacock travelled to North Wales in January 1810 where he visited Maentwrog and met his future wife, Jane Gryffydh.

By September 1815 had settled at Great Marlow and wrote Headlong Hall in 1815. It was published the following year. With this work Peacock found the true field for his literary gift in the satiric novel.

Peacock continued to produce; the satirical novels Melincourt in 1817 and Nightmare Abbey in 1818.

At the beginning of 1819, Peacock was summoned to London for probation with the East India Company. Peacock's test papers earned the commendation, Nothing superfluous and nothing wanting. This career was to run alongside his literary one for several decades.

Peacock married Jane Griffith or Gryffydh in 1820. They went on to have four children.

In 1820 Peacock wrote The Four Ages of Poetry, which argued that poetry's relevance was being eclipsed by science, a claim which provoked Shelley's Defence of Poetry.

In the winter of 1825–6 he wrote Paper Money Lyrics and other Poems during the prevalence of an influenza to which the beautiful fabric of paper-credit is periodically subject.

In 1829 he published The Misfortunes of Elphin, and in 1831 Crotchet Castle, the most mature and perhaps most appreciated of his works.

By 1836 his official career was crowned by his appointment as Chief Examiner of Indian Correspondence.

In about 1852 towards the end of Peacock's service in the India office, his taste for leisure and appetite for writing returned and with it his entertaining and scholarly Horæ Dramaticæ.

In 1860 came the publication of his last novel; Gryll Grange. Later, that same year he added the appendix of Shelley's letters, a matter of great literary importance.

Thomas Love Peacock died at Lower Halliford, on 23rd January, 1866, from injuries sustained in a fire in attempting to save his library. He is buried in the new cemetery at Shepperton.

Index of Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I - THE VILLA

CHAPTER II - THE MARCH OF MIND

CHAPTER III - THE ROMAN CAMP

CHAPTER IV - THE PARTY

CHAPTER V - CHARACTERS

CHAPTER VI - THEORIES

CHAPTER VII - THE SLEEPING VENUS

CHAPTER VIII - SCIENCE AND CHARITY

CHAPTER IX - THE VOYAGE

CHAPTER X - THE VOYAGE, CONTINUED

CHAPTER XI - CORRESPONDENCE

CHAPTER XII - THE MOUNTAIN INN

CHAPTER XIII - THE LAKE—THE RUIN

CHAPTER XIV - THE DINGLE

CHAPTER XV. THE FARM

CHAPTER XVI - THE NEWSPAPER

CHAPTER XVII - THE INVITATION

CHAPTER XVIII - CHAINMAIL HALL

CONCLUSION

FOOTNOTE

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK - A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK -  ACONCISE BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Thomas Love Peacock was born at Weymouth in 1785.  His first poem, The Genius of the Thames, was in its second edition when he became one of the friends of Shelley.  That was in 1812, when Shelley’s age was twenty, Peacock’s twenty-seven.  The acquaintance strengthened, until Peacock became the friend in whose judgment Shelley put especial trust.  There were many points of agreement.  Peacock, at that time, shared, in a more practical way, Shelley’s desire for root and branch reform; both wore poets, although not equally gifted, and both loved Plato and the Greek tragedians.  In Crotchet Castle Peacock has expressed his own delight in Greek literature through the talk of the Reverend Dr. Folliott.

But Shelley’s friendship for Peacock included a trust in him that was maintained by points of unlikeness.  Peacock was shrewd and witty.  He delighted in extravagance of a satire which usually said more than it meant, but always rested upon a foundation of good sense.  Then also there was a touch of the poet to give grace to the utterances of a clear-headed man of the world.  It was Peacock who gave its name to Shelley’s poem of Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, published in 1816.  The Spirit of Solitude being treated as a spirit of evil, Peacock suggested calling it Alastor, since the Greek ἀλάστωρ means an evil genius.

Peacock’s novels are unlike those of other men: they are the genuine expressions of an original and independent mind.  His reading and his thinking ran together; there is free quotation, free play of wit and satire, grace of invention too, but always unconventional.  The story is always pleasant, although always secondary to the play of thought for which it gives occasion.  He quarrelled with verse, whimsically but in all seriousness, in an article on The Four Ages of Poetry, contributed in 1820 to a short-lived journal, Ollier’s Literary Miscellany.  The four ages were, he said, the iron age, the Bardic; the golden, the Homeric; the silver, the Virgilian; and the brass, in which he himself lived.  A poet in our time, he said, is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community . . . The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can, therefore, serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveller like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth.  In another part of this essay he says: While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in and accelerating the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age.  Mr. Scott digs up the poacher and cattle-stealers of the ancient Border.  Lord Byron cruises for thieves and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek islands.  Mr. Southey wades through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings them into an epic.  And so forth; Peacock going on to characterise, in further illustration of his argument, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Moore, and Campbell.  He did not refer to Shelley; and Shelley read his friend’s whimsical attack on poetry with all good humour, proceeding to reply to it with a Defence of Poetry, which would have appeared in the same journal, if the journal had survived.  In this novel of Crotchet Castle there is the same good-humoured exaggeration in the treatment of our learned friend—Lord Brougham—to whom and to whose labours for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge there are repeated allusions.  In one case Peacock associates the labours of our learned friend for the general instruction of the masses with encouragement of robbery, and in another with body-snatching, or, worse, murder for dissection.  The Lord deliver me from the learned friend! says Dr. Folliott.  Brougham’s elevation to a peerage in November, 1830, as Lord Brougham and Vaux, is referred to on page 177, where he is called Sir Guy do Vaux.  It is not to be forgotten, in the reading, that this story was written in 1831, the year before the passing of the Reform Bill.  It ends with a scene suggested by the agricultural riots of that time.  In the ninth chapter, again, there is a passage dealing with Sir Walter Scott after the fashion of the criticisms in the Four Ages of Poetry.  But this critical satire gave nobody pain.  Always there was a ground-work of good sense, and the broad sweep of the satire was utterly unlike the nibbling censure of the men whose wit is tainted with ill-humour.  We may see also that the poet’s nature cannot be expelled. In this volume we should find the touch of a poet’s hand in the tale itself when dealing with the adventures of Mr. Chainmail, while he stays at the Welsh mountain inn, if the story did not again and again break out into actual song, for it includes half-a-dozen little poems.

When Peacock wrote his attack on Poetry, he had, only two years before, produced a poem of his own—Rhododaphne—with a Greek fancy of the true and the false love daintily worked out.  It was his chief work in verse, and gave much pleasure to a few, among them his friend Shelley.  But he felt that, as the world went, he was not strong enough to help it by his singing, so he confined his writing to the novels, in which he could speak his mind in his own way, while doing his duty by his country in the East India House, where he obtained a post in 1818.  From 1836 to 1856, when he retired on a pension, he was Examiner of India Correspondence. Peacock died in 1866, aged eighty-one.

H. M.

NOTE that in this tale Mac Quedy is Mac Q. E. D., son of a demonstration; Mr. Skionar, the transcendentalist, is named from Ski(as) onar, the dream of a shadow; and Mr. Philpot, who loves rivers, is Phil(o)pot(amos).

CHAPTER I - THE VILLA.

Captain Jamy.  I wad full fain hear some question ’tween you tway.

HENRY V.

In one of those beautiful valleys, through which the Thames (not yet polluted by the tide, the scouring of cities, or even the minor defilement of the sandy streams of Surrey) rolls a clear flood through flowery meadows, under the shade of old beech woods, and the smooth mossy greensward of the chalk hills (which pour into it their tributary rivulets, as pure and pellucid as the fountain of Bandusium, or the wells of Scamander, by which the wives and daughters of the Trojans washed their splendid garments in the days of peace, before the coming of the Greeks); in one of those beautiful valleys, on a bold round-surfaced lawn, spotted with juniper, that opened itself in the bosom of an old wood, which rose with a steep, but not precipitous ascent, from the river to the summit of the hill, stood the castellated villa of a retired citizen.  Ebenezer Mac Crotchet, Esquire, was the London-born offspring of a worthy native of the north countrie, who had walked up to London on a commercial adventure, with all his surplus capital, not very neatly tied up in a not very clean handkerchief, suspended over his shoulder from the end of a hooked stick, extracted from the first hedge on his pilgrimage; and who, after having worked himself a step or two up the ladder of life, had won the virgin heart of the only daughter of a highly respectable merchant of Duke’s Place, with whom he inherited the honest fruits of a long series of ingenuous dealings.

Mr. Mac Crotchet had derived from his mother the instinct, and from his father the rational principle, of enriching himself at the expense of the rest of mankind, by all the recognised modes of accumulation on the windy side of the law.  After passing many years in the Alley, watching the turn of the market, and playing many games almost as desperate as that of the soldier of Lucullus, the fear of losing what he had so righteously gained predominated over the sacred thirst of paper-money; his caution got the better of his instinct, or rather transferred it from the department of acquisition to that of conservation.  His friend, Mr. Ramsbottom, the zodiacal mythologist, told him that he had done well to withdraw from the region of Uranus or Brahma, the Maker, to that of Saturn or Veeshnu, the Preserver, before he fell under the eye of Jupiter or Seva, the Destroyer, who might have struck him down at a blow.

It is said that a Scotchman,