Thomas Love Peacock was born on 18 October 1785 at Weymouth, Dorset, a coastal town whose mixture of fashionable society, maritime activity, and open sea offered an early imaginative setting for a writer who would remain drawn throughout his life to rivers, voyages, landscapes, and the contrast between civilized conversation and the unruly forces of nature. He was the only child of Samuel Peacock, a London glass merc…
“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.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Longing
Thomas Shadwell, born about 1642 and dead on 19 November 1692, was one of the busiest, most contentious, and most revealing writers of England’s Restoration. He wrote poems, prologues, epilogues, political satires, translations, and royal panegyrics, but his chief achievement was in the theatre. For more than two decades he supplied London with comedies whose streets, taverns, gaming rooms, spas, lodgings, laboratori…
“The haste of a fool is the slowest thing in the world.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Light Verse Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Fear, Longing
