Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Peacock, John Macleay
PEACOCK, JOHN MACLEAY (1817–1877), verse-writer, son of William Peacock, was born on 31 March 1817 at Kincardine, Perthshire, the seventh of eight children. While his family was young the father died, and the struggle for existence became severe. Peacock was sent to work at a very early age, first at a tobacco factory, and afterwards at some bleaching works. Ultimately he was apprenticed to boiler-making, and this became his trade. Commercial fluctuations, and a strong natural disposition to travel, took him in the course of his lifetime to many parts of the world. Thus he gathered knowledge which went far to compensate for the want of school-training. He became a man of wide information, and a clear and original thinker. In both politics and religion he was always radical. He shared actively in the chartist movement, and afterwards, for many years, until his death, was an energetic secularist. For a considerable period he was employed at Laird's iron shipbuilding works, Birkenhead, where the Alabama was built; but this did not prevent him from openly advocating the cause of the north in the American civil war. Undoubtedly his outspokenness helped to keep him poor. Physically he was delicate, and, his occupation being arduous, in middle life his health failed; thenceforward he only earned a precarious income, chiefly as a newsvendor. He died in Glasgow of heart disease on 4 May 1877.
If Peacock's worldly circumstances had been better, or his disposition less modest, he might have become more famous, for wherever his work was known it was highly valued. At Birkenhead, at the Shakespeare tercentenary (1864), he was considered the most fitting person in the town to plant the memorial oak-tree. He directed much vigorous verse against what he regarded as theological superstition and political tyranny; but his finest poetical work was of a contemplative kind. Three volumes of his poems have been published, viz.: ‘Poems and Songs’ (1864), ‘Hours of Reverie’ (1867), and a selection of published and unpublished verse (to which is prefixed a portrait of Peacock), edited by the present writer for the benefit of the widow in 1880.
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