Mervyn Peake

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Peake, Mervyn (1911–1968). British writer and illustrator, born in China, the son of medical missionaries. He is now best known as a novelist, but he studied at the Royal Academy Schools and spent much of his career teaching drawing, notably at Westminster School of Art, 1935–8, and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, 1950–60. His reputation rests mainly on his trilogy of novels Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959), a work of grotesque Gothic fantasy to which his vividly imaginative drawing style was well matched (originally, however, the books were published without his accompanying illustrations). Peake also illustrated numerous other books, including Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1943), Stevenson's Treasure Island (1949), and several by himself (among them an instructional manual, The Craft of the Lead Pencil, 1946). In 1946 he was commissioned by the Ministry of Information to make drawings of people liberated from Belsen concentration camp—an experience that left him emotionally scarred. In the last decade of his life he was gradually incapacitated by Parkinson's disease and his final works were completed with the aid of his wife Maeve Gilmore. Peake is described in the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘Tall, thin, dark, and haggard … gentle, gracious, unworldly, and unpractical. He lived in many ways outside convention, wearing strange clothes and behaving in a gently whimsical fashion which puzzled the ordinary.’

Peake, Mervyn (Laurence) (1911–68), novelist, poet, and artist. He was commissioned as a war artist and visited Belsen in 1945 on a journalistic expedition for The Leader, an experience which profoundly affected him. His novel Titus Groan (1946) was followed by Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959), which as a trilogy form the work for which Peake is best remembered, a creation of grotesque yet precise Gothic fantasy, recounting the life of Titus, 77th earl of Groan, in his crumbling castle of Gormenghast, surrounded by a cast of characters which includes the colourful Fuchsia, Dr Prunesquallor, and the melancholy Muzzlehatch. Peake's poetry includes The Glassblowers (1950) and The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962), a ballad of the blitz; he illustrated most of his own work, and also produced memorable drawings for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1943), Treasure Island (1949), and other works. A lighter side of his prolific imagination is seen in his posthumous A Book of Nonsense (1972).