Peacock’s Lost Epilogue to Skeffington’s Lose No Time

One of the “lost” works of Thomas Love Peacock identified by H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones in an appendix to the Halliford Edition was an epilogue to Lumley Skeffington’s comedy Lose No Time, which was first performed at Drury Lane on June 11, 1813. As evidence of Peacock’s authorship, his editors cited a reference to the epilogue in a contemporary review of the play in the British Press, quoted many years later by William Jerdan in his Autobiography. But since the play remained in manuscript, they concluded, “It is unlikely that this epilogue was ever printed; it has probably perished.”¹ Although the odds of its survival may have seemed rather long, a search of contemporary newspapers and magazines—aided by the availability of electronic databases—has in fact turned up three complete texts of Peacock’s 48-line epilogue.

Almost nothing is definitely known about Peacock’s connection with the celebrated fop and playwright Lumley St. George Skeffington (1771–1850), who became Sir Lumley, Baronet, upon the death of his father in January 1815. A frequent target of satire in the caricatures of James Gillray as well as the verse of Byron and Thomas Moore, Skeffington was later identified by Peacock’s protégé Henry Cole and by his granddaughter Edith Nicolls as the model for the character of the Honourable Mr. Listless in Nightmare Abbey (1818).² Claire Clairmont told Edward Trelawny in her later years that, after the suicide of Harriet Shelley in December 1816, Skeffington was consulted as to the propriety of an immediate marriage between Shelley and Mary Godwin, and that he was told all the facts of the case except the names of the parties.³ Because Peacock was also consulted, biographers have naturally assumed that he was Shelley’s emissary on this occasion, though in his “Memoirs” he mentions only his own advice in favor of an immediate marriage.⁴

Since Peacock is unlikely to have known Skeffington socially, they probably met through their involvement in the London theater. During the years 1811–13, Peacock was literally a charity case, receiving three separate grants from the Literary Fund in November 1811, May 1812, and June 1813 before becoming the recipient of Shelley’s generous financial assistance.⁵ Writing to the Committee of the Literary Fund on May 20, 1812, his friend and publisher Edward Hookham explained that Peacock had been introduced to James Grant Raymond, the acting manager of the Drury Lane Company, with a view to his gaining “a footing on the stage.”⁶ According to Hookham, a lost farce entitled “Mirth in the Mountains” had already been submitted to Raymond, and the surviving manuscripts of “The Dilettanti” and “The Three Doctors” contain evidence that they, too, were written for the Drury Lane Company.⁷ Thus Peacock would have been in more or less direct competition with Skeffington as a writer of stage comedy, and he must have been dismayed when Lose No Time was selected for performance in preference to one of his own farces.

Lose No Time, a comedy in three acts, was the last of Skeffington’s seven dramatic works to be performed on the London stage.⁸ Although they attracted a fair amount of attention on account of his reputation as a leader of fashion, his plays are now virtually unknown because they never achieved sufficient success to be preserved in printed form.⁹ Among the various synopses of Lose No Time that can be found in contemporary reviews, one that appeared in the European Magazine provides the clearest overview of the main plot, even if it omits details of the episodes:

Emmeline, the daughter of Delmont, a whimsical character who resides near York, is beloved by two young officers of the same regiment, Albany and Melborough. Although rivals, they continue to be friends. Her father, who cannot determine to which he shall give her hand, writes to each of them, that he who arrives first at Woodlands, shall be his son-in-law. The friends communicate to each other this letter...