Gryll Grange: Education, Modernity and Peacock's Final Comic Judgement
Ellen Terry ('Choosing'), 1864, by George Frederic Watts. Public domain, via the National Portrait Gallery, London.
In the previous post, we considered Gryll Grange as a novel of retreat: Peacock's late defence of leisure, conversation and civilisation against the demands of a Victorian century that had learned to measure everything. This concluding post of our Peacock summer series turns to the other half of the novel's preoccupation—education—and to the question Peacock leaves hanging at the end of his final work: what, after seventy years of observing his fellow citizens, did he actually think of the modern world?
Peacock was, by temperament and formation, an autodidact. His schooling was intermittent; his true education came from voracious, unsystematic reading and from the conversation of friends, most famously Shelley, with whom he argued philosophy by the banks of the Thames. At the East India Company, where he spent twenty-nine years and rose to chief examiner, his working life was administrative rather than academic. This is relevant because Gryll Grange is saturated with debate about what education is for, and Peacock writes as a man who formed himself outside the institutions he examines.
The novel's discussions of education are among its most pointed. Through the comfortable scepticism of the Rev. Dr Opimian, who presides over Mr Gryll's table much as earlier Peacock hosts presided over theirs, the book dissects the university system, the cult of examinations and the fashion for producing specialists—men stuffed with useful knowledge who know nothing worth knowing. The dialogue is characteristically even-handed: the defenders of the old classical curriculum are mocked for defending empty forms, while the modernisers are mocked for replacing them with new empties. Peacock's complaint is not that the age educates badly, but that it educates narrowly, and mistakes accumulation for cultivation.
This critique extends, more radically for its time, to the education of women. Morgiana Gryll is educated, witty and intellectually confident—a heroine who holds her own in every debate she enters. Peacock had long been interested in the question; The Misfortunes of Elphin and the essays of his later years circle around it. In Gryll Grange the argument is settled by example rather than lecture: the woman at the centre of the novel is treated, and treats herself, as a mind rather than an ornament, albeit less dramatically than Maria Fluart in another P-Wave Classic, Hermsprong by Robert Bage. For a novel published in 1860, when women's higher education was still regarded as an eccentricity, this is a subtly radical position, and it is delivered without a trace of the pulpit.
Against education, Gryll Grange sets its supposed opposite: modernity. The great satirical portrait here is Lord Curryfin, a peer of restless modern accomplishments—scientist, lecturer, improviser of entertainments, devotee of every improvement that catches his attention. He is Crotchet Castle's Mr Chainmail updated: where Chainmail fused chivalry and commerce, Curryfin fuses enlightenment and fashion. His enthusiasm is endless and directionless. Peacock is affectionate about him, but the satire has teeth: Curryfin is what happens when curiosity is severed from judgement, when the passion for the new becomes a temperament rather than a discipline.
Yet it would be a mistake to read Gryll Grange as merely reactionary. What Peacock objects to in modernity is not its curiosity but its lack of proportion—the assumption that because something can be systematised, measured or improved, it should be. His counter-proposal is not the past. It is a judgement, case by case, of what is worth keeping. The novel's resolution dramatises exactly this: Falconer and Morgiana's future settlement is a model community that retains rural retreat and classical ease while embracing whatever modern improvement has actually proven itself. It is a comic adjudication rather than a comic defeat: civilisation, for late Peacock, is not the rejection of the new but the refusal to be governed by it.
This is Peacock's final comic judgement, and it is earned across a career. The young man who debated philosophy with Shelley became the satirist who dismantled every system that promised to make life rational, and finally the old man who proposed a test more modest and more demanding: does this improvement make for a good dinner, a good conversation, a good life? The spirit that mocked the march of mind in 1831 is recognisable in 1860, but it has mellowed into something closer to wisdom. The scepticism remains; the sneer has gone.
Reading the novel now, in an age of educational reforms, technological evangelism and confident theories of how everything should be organised, the continuity of its concerns is striking. Peacock's questions have not aged: what is education for, who decides, and why are we so confident that the newest answer is the best one? His answers—be suspicious of systems, hospitable to pleasures, faithful to conversation—are as unfashionable and as durable as ever.
Crotchet Castle & Gryll Grange is available now in paperback and ebook editions from P-Wave Press and booksellers worldwide.
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And with that, our Peacock summer series closes. Across these posts we have travelled from the philosophical laboratory of Headlong Hall, through the manic melancholy and literary celebrity of Nightmare Abbey, into the political greenwood of Maid Marian and the drowned bardic kingdoms of The Misfortunes of Elphin, onwards to the reform-fuelled chatter of Crotchet Castle, and finally to the autumnal retreat of Gryll Grange. Across all the posts, one theme has persisted: Peacock's refusal to let any idea—not progress, not tradition, not love, not utility—escape the discipline of laughter.
These conversations have been many years in the making at P-Wave Press. Our three two-volume editions of Peacock's novels bring together the full span of his comic fiction—newly introduced, annotated and designed for readers of today—so that one of the strangest, funniest and most unfairly neglected voices of the nineteenth century can be read as he deserves.
The three P-Wave Classics Thomas Love Peacock ebooks are available on Google Play with a tiered series discount during the Peacock summer series.