The reminiscence supports the usual image of Peacock as a man and writer with the detachment to stand slightly aside from the major literary and political movements of his time and to view objectively and laugh at their more absurd manifestations. Such a view is accurate but incomplete, for while Peacock was always ready to laugh at absurdity, he was also, in both his public life and the three stages of his literary career, very much a man of his time.
In an age of intensive self-dramatization and reader interest in the private lives of writers, Peacock, who considered revelatory biography no more than village gossip on a larger scale, kept his own private life private, so that little is known of this life save that part of it necessarily a matter of public record. Thomas Love Peacock was born 18 October 1785 at Weymouth in Dorset, the only son of Samuel and Sarah Love Peacock. Little is known of Samuel except that he died or more probably simply disappeared about 1788, at which time Sarah and her son moved to Chertsey to be near her parents.
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