Yearning for the good old days, Thomas Love Peacock’s Mr. Escot, “always looking into the dark side of the question,” finds in material progress “only so many links in the great chain of corruption” and in its attendant multiplication of wants and desires only what leads to decline from “the primitive dignity of [man’s] sylvan [woodsy] origin.”
It’s in Peacock’s funny, funny 1816 novel, Headlong Hall.
At breakfast in a roadside inn, Escot rails against the beef on the table: “The natural and original man lived in the woods: the roots and fruits of the earth supplied his simple nutriment: he had few desires and no diseases.” Once hunting of “the goat and the deer” became the norm, however, and fire was invented [sic] to cook them, “luxury, disease, and premature death were let loose on the world.”
Egad, the man was a vegetarian, which is to be classified for rhyming if nothing else with Lerner and Loew’s Eliza Doolittle’s discovered dancing with a Hungarian.
Blithe Spirit 