Thomas Love Peacock left school at about twelve and educated himself in the reading room of the British Museum, which may explain why his novels feel like the best kind of library: crowded, opinionated and very funny. He was born in Weymouth, on the Dorset coast, and he grew up to write a kind of book almost nobody else has tried. In a Peacock novel, a group of eccentrics gather at a country house, each obsessed with one idea, and they argue over dinner. There is a little plot, and usually a wedding, but mostly there is talk.

The best of them is Nightmare Abbey (1818). Its hero, Scythrop Glowry, lives in a gloomy tower, reads German tragedies, plots to reform the world, and cannot decide between two women. Readers at the time recognized him at once as Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was Peacock’s close friend. Shelley took it well. Also in the house are a poet of melancholy named Mr Cypress, who is Lord Byron, and a muddled philosopher named Mr Flosky, who is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Peacock mocks the Romantic mood of doom, but he does it with affection.

Peacock had a second, very different career. In 1819 he joined the East India Company in London, where he worked for nearly forty years, rising to one of its senior posts and overseeing the company’s steamships. Novelists with day jobs are nothing new.

He also started one of the great arguments about poetry. In 1820 he published “The Four Ages of Poetry,” a teasing essay claiming that poetry had become a useless toy in an age of science. Shelley answered with A Defence of Poetry, which ends with the famous line that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Without Peacock’s provocation, we might not have it.

He was later Shelley’s executor, and his daughter Mary Ellen married the novelist George Meredith. Peacock lived to eighty, long enough to write one last talky novel, Gryll Grange, in 1860.