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Today Mervyn Peake's reputation
rests largely on his three novels, Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast
(1950), and Titus Alone (1959) which became widely known after they
were published as Penguin Modern Classics in 1968. Prior to that, Peake was
known rather for his poems, paintings, drawings, and book illustrations.
Specialists still consider the pictures he provided for The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner as one of the most powerful interpretations of the
poem, and his Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
as the most memorable illustrated edition. During the 1950s most of Peake's
energy went into playwriting, but only one of his plays reached the London
stage.
The younger son of missionary
parents who had met and married in China, Peake was born on 9 July 1911 in
Kuling, a mountain village where Westerners took refuge from the heat of
the Yangtse basin. The following year the family moved to Tientsin, where
Dr Peake ran a mission hospital. They returned to England 1923; Dr Peake
set up as a GP in Wallington, and Mervyn joined his elder brother Leslie at
Eltham College, a school for the sons of missionaries. There he excelled
only in art and sports and when he left it was to study art, first in
Croydon and then at the Royal Academy Schools.
During his art studies, Peake was
writing verse as well as painting and drawing. The one long poem from this
time that has survived, “The Touch o' the Ash” (printed in Peake's
Progress), is a maritime ghost story, and his first published poem was
about Vikings. Peake was a thorough-going romantic whose work generally
ignored contemporary poetical preoccupations. The one poem that alludes to
the Munich crisis of 1938, for instance, he did not reprint in his
collections of verse; it was identified only much later by bibliographers
seeking to establish Peake's oeuvre. When he made propaganda drawings of
wartime atrocities, they were entirely works of imagination. It took a
visit to the newly liberated concentration camp at Belsen to nudge him into
depicting in both word and image the reality that he witnessed, and the
emotional cost of the experience was great. Some claim he never recovered
from it.
Before completing his diploma at
the Royal Academy schools, Peake joined an artist community on the Channel
Island of Sark. He developed a life-long love for the island, which figures
both literally and metaphorically in his novels. On the strength of works
he exhibited during his two years there, he was offered a post teaching
life drawing at the Westminster School of Art in London, and this part-time
activity remained his main source of income for the rest of his life.
At the Westminster School Peake
fell in love with a sculpture student, Maeve Gilmore; they married in
December 1936. He drew her hundreds of times, painted numerous portraits,
and put her, in various guises, into many of his works. During the
following t
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First published 28 February 2003
Citation:
Winnington, G Peter. "Mervyn Peake". The Literary
Encyclopedia. 28 February 2003.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3515, accessed 17
October 2008.]
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