Bryan Magee, Wagner and Thomas Love Peacock: An Unlikely Alliance

March 2011, Volume 5, Number 1, 44–5.

The novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) are best known for their set-piece conversation scenes. In these a little crowd of contradictory characters bubbles with observation and wit, some of them pursuing their own crotchets, when they are actually talking about different things, yet still bouncing off one another, the whole being energised by a shared vitality. It comes across like one of the brilliant ensemble scenes in Rossini’s comic operas – opera buffa without the music.