Appendix B - An Essay on Fashionable Literature (1818)

Summary

Peacock's heavily revised manuscript draft of ‘An Essay on Fashionable Literature’ is preserved in British Library Add. MS 36815, folios 67–85. The composition of the essay in the summer of 1818 is recorded in considerable detail in his Marlow Journal, from 9 August, when he ‘Made some memoranda for my Essay’, to 23 August, when he ‘Wrote a little of Essay’ (Letters, 1.137–8). Long before he abandoned the project, its character had changed from the sort of general essay promised by its title to a focused attack on the Edinburgh Review article on Coleridge's Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep (1816) as a specimen of the dishonesty of contemporary periodical criticism. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones did valuable service to Peacock scholarship by publishing this unfinished essay (Halliford, 8.261–91, 521–7). However, they made the rough draft appear to be a more finished work than it actually is, not only by liberally adding punctuation, capitalization and italics, but also by expanding many of Peacock's brief references into full quotations of passages fromColeridge's poems and/or the Edinburgh Review. This appendix presents the final text of the manuscript more nearly in the state in which Peacock left it, including all the numerous notes that he inserted as reminders for revision or expansion. Interlinear or cross-written additions are incorporated into the text whenever possible. Peacock's footnotes as well as his other notes written above or below the line or in the margins are inserted in the text within curly brackets, while their placement in the manuscript is explained in the editorial footnotes. Although deletions made in the course of hasty composition are not recorded, a few finished passages that Peacock marked for deletion are retained within angle brackets. Textual matters are discussed as necessary in the editorial footnotes, which are, however, primarily explanatory.

An Essay on Fashionable Literature.

I. The fashionable metropolitan winter which begins in spring and ends in autumn is the season of happy re-union to those ornamental varieties of the human species who live to be amused for the benefit of social order. It is the period of the general muster the levy en masse of gentlemen in stays and ladies in short petticoats against the arch enemy Time.