Fiction
Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Love Peacock(1785–1864), who worked beside Lamb in the East India
Office under John Mill, was a fine satirist. Like the gifted poet Walter Savage
Landor, Peacock was a long-lived 18th-century gentleman Radical. Both wrote
imaginary conversations between writers, but Landor’s historical conversations
have none of the quickness of Peacock’s ironic country-house dialogues between
‘perfectibilians, deteriorationists, status-quo-ites ... transcendentalists, political
economists, theorists in all sciences ... lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good
dinners’.
The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), set in 6th-century Wales, contains ‘The War
Song of Dinas Vawr’, a parody of the dark-age battle-poem idealized by the
Romantics: ‘The mountain sheep are sweeter / But the valley sheep are fatter; / We
therefore deemed it meeter / To carry off the latter.’
Mary Shelley
If Peacock’s dialogues are modelled upon Plato’s,Frankenstein, or the Modern
Pr ometheus by Mary Shelley(1797–1851) is a cross between the Gothic tale and the
fable of ideas; neither is realistic.Frankenstein began as a literary experiment within
a social experiment – as a ‘ghost story’ in a game proposed by Byron at the Villa
Diodati on Lac Leman, Switzerland, in 1816, while Mary’s half-sister Claire
Clairmont was having an affair with Byron. Two years earlier Mary, aged 16, had
eloped with Shelley from the home of her father, the philosopher-novelist William
Godwin. Her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had died after her birth in
- Mary herself lost a daughter at 17, bore a son at 18, and, after the suicides of
another of her half-sisters and of Shelley’s wife, married the poet at 19. She had lost
another child before she was widowed at 24. She dedicated Frankenstein to Godwin.
Shelley wrote a preface, supposedly by Mary, and also a disingenuous pre-publica-
tion review in which he refers to the author as male and as showing the influence of
Godwin. Men were the midwives of this myth-breeding text.
Frankenstein is an epistolary narrative with three narrators, the English Arctic
explorer Capt. Walton, the German scientist Victor Frankenstein, and the nameless
‘man’ which Frankenstein ‘creates’ out of human body-parts by electrical experi-
ment.The Creature wants a mate, which Frankenstein assembles but destroys. The
monster then kills its creator’s brother, his friend and his wife; he tries to kill it, but
it escapes into the Arctic. The sensational contents, pathos and moral ideas of
Fr ankenstein are conveyed in a mechanical style. Its interest is cultural, moral, philo-
sophical and psychological: it is a nightmare of alienation; a sentimental critique of
the victorious intellect to which Shelley and Godwin trusted; and a negative critique
ofa Faustian overconfidence in natural science.
Maria Edgeworth
Women had made a notable contribution to fiction from the middle of the 18th
century, and a better-recognized contribution from early in the 19th. The historical
novel was perfected by Scott, but he did not invent it. In Waverley he wrote ‘so as in
some distant degree to emulate the admirable portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth’.
He refers to the anonymous Castle Rackrent, published 1800. SubtitledAn Hibernian
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