Read in my hardcover omnibus "The Pleasures of Peacock" (104 pgs)

Peacock's version of Robin Hood contains some amusingly snarky comments along with the familiar story. ( )

Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock was one of the first Robin Hood novels that started appearing from the start of the Nineteenth Century. Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1820) is taken to be the first, although Peacock had written and finished his book all but 3 chapters in 1818, and Maid Marian was published in 1822. Contemporary readers saw it as a parody of Ivanhoe.

Apart from the fact that they are interesting reads in their own value, both novels form the cornerstone of the popular culture that started developing around the figure of Robin Hood, although neither mentions him in the title. The way we see Robin Hood is probably based on having absorbed stories and images from various children's books and Disney animation films. It was in the early Nineteenth Century that Robin Hood became associated with a number of stock characters in prose tales and novels.

In 1795, Robin Hood : a collection of all the ancient poems, songs and ballads now extant relative to that celebrated English outlaw was published. Prior to that the figure of Robin Hood was only recorded in various Fifteenth Century ballads. However, the identity of Robin Hood, the characters he is now usually associated with, particulars about his descent, and the circumstances of his life and deeds varied greatly in these ballads. It even wasn't clear in which epoch the character was supposed to have lived, let alone tie him to any real persons.

The Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries saw the compilation of various collections of ballads. Between the 15th and 17th centuries some plays had been written and staged about Robin hood, for example Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Notyngham in 1475 or Robin Hood and his Crew of Soldiers (1661). Prose accounts started to be written in the 16th and 17th centuries. Perhaps Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Love Peacock took their inspiration from Robin Hood : a collection of all the ancient poems, songs and ballads now extant relative to that celebrated English outlaw published in 1795. Nonetheless, the first Robin Hood novel was written in 1791, but not published, while the first Robin Hood novel to be published, Robin Hood: A Tale of the Olden Time appeared anonymously in 1819. So, obviously, something was buzzing, and the works of Peacock and Sir Walter Scott are among the earliest Robin Hood novels.

Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock is interesting because although the story is quite familiar, the characters, their names and identity and their actions are quite different from let's say the Disney version. For instance, Maid Marian never appears in the medieval ballads, while the character Maid Marian who appears in the novel by Thomas Love Peacock seems to have derived from a particular source, namely the Elizabethan playwright, Anthony Munday who presents her as Matilda, daughter of Robert Fitzwalter. Various other details, such as Robin Hood's identity as a nobleman, and the interrupted marriage at the beginning of the novel seem to have derived from various sources, put together by Peacock.

Thomas Love Peacock's novels are never very long, and this short novel Maid Marian can be read as a short, refreshing version of the Robin Hood legend. In fact, Maid Marian is much more accessible to modern readers than the shorter novels that Thomas Love Peacock is mostly remembered for, although on the other hand it lacks the originality of those novels. Still, I think this mostly forgotten novel is quite worthwhile for the perspective ot offers on the gestation of the popular novelistic tradition around the figure of Robin Hood before the age of film. ( )

A fairly standard 19th Century adaptation of the 13th Century folklore legend of Robin Hood. ( )