Cf. his Preface to _The Newcomes_: “This, then, is to be a story, may it please you, in which jackdaws will wear peacocks’ feathers, and awaken the just ridicule of the peacocks, in which, while every justice is done to the peacocks themselves * * * exception will yet be taken to the absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of their pert squeaking;” 7. [84] Preface to _Pickwick_ (1847 edition), xix. Cf. his letter to Charles Knight: “My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else--the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time--and the men who, through long years to come, will do more to damage the real, useful truths of political economy than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life:” _Letters_, I, 363. [85] _The Later Renaissance_, 113. [86] _Evolution of the English Novel_, 120. [87] 1816 _Headlong Hall_ 1817 _Melincourt_ (also _Northanger Abbey_) 1818 _Nightmare Abbey_ 1822 _Maid Marian_ 1828 _The Voyage of Captain Popanilla_ 1829 _The Misfortunes of Elphin_ 1831 _Crochet Castle_ 1833 _Ixion_, and _The Infernal Marriage_ 1839 _Catherine_ 1841 _The Yellowplush Papers_ 1845 _The Legend of the Rhine_ 1847 _Novels by Eminent Hands_ 1849 _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_ 1850 _Rebecca and Rowena_ 1855 _The Rose and the Ring_ 1856 _The Shaving of Shagpat_ 1857 _Farina_ 1861 _Gryll Grange_ 1871 _The Coming Race_ 1872 _Erewhon_ 1901 _Erewhon Revisited_ [88] _Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon_, 65. [89] Draper: _Social Satire of Thomas Love Peacock_. Modern Language Notes, XXXIV, I [90] With the exception of _The Way of All Flesh_; another instance of Butler’s wider range. [91] The word _novel_ must of course be stretched if it is to include this set of fantastic fiction. But that is easily done by accepting Chesterton’s dictum: “Now in the sense in which there is such a thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel.” _Charles Dickens_, 114. The other alternative is the one taken by Mrs. Oliphant: “We use the word adventurer advisedly, for we cannot regard Peacock’s entry into the field of fiction as by any means an authorized one. One cannot help feeling that he did not want to write novels, but that he found that he could not get at the public in any other way; * * * The consequence is that his novels are not novels in the proper sense of the word.” _Victorian Age of English Literature_, 16. Cf. Shaw, of whose dramas a similar statement might be made. [92] “The desideratum of a Peacockian character is that he shall be able to talk.” Freeman: _Life and Novels of Peacock_, 233. [93] _Crochet Castle_, 35.