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…
“England is the modern Carthage; the love of gold, the last corruption of man, pervades the whole state from the centre to the extremities.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Longing
Tobias George Smollett, baptized on 19 March 1721 and generally believed to have been born shortly before that date, was one of the most forceful, combative, and variously gifted writers of eighteenth-century Britain. He died on 17 September 1771, only about fifty years old, yet in that compressed lifetime he became a surgeon, naval observer, playwright, poet, translator, journalist, editor, political polemicist, his…
“Facts are stubborn things.”
Neighbourhood:
Enlightenment Poets, Satirical Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Joy, Tenderness
