Piccok

Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) was an English novelist, poet, and satirist celebrated for the sparkling dialogue and intellectual comedy of his short novels. Largely self-educated in the classics, he spent his early adulthood writing poetry before joining the East India Company in 1819, where he rose to become chief examiner, serving for over thirty years with the young John Stuart Mill as his assistant.

Peacock's closest literary friendship was with Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom he visited at Lake Geneva in 1816, and whose circle and radical enthusiasms he gently mocked in fiction. His signature form—the country-house debate novel—gathers eccentric characters around a dinner table to argue philosophy, politics, and progress, punctuated by comic songs.

His principal works include Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), Nightmare Abbey (1818), which satirizes Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley himself, The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), Crotchet Castle (1831), and his final novel, Gryll Grange (1860). He is also remembered for the rousing poem "The War-Song of Dinas Vawr" and his affectionate Memoirs of Shelley (1858). Peacock's daughter Mary Ellen married the novelist George Meredith, and his blend of classical wit and modern satire remains admired today.