Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake (July 9, 1911 - November 17, 1968) was a British modernist writer and illustrator, best known for what are usually called the Gormenghast books, though the 'Titus' books would be more accurate: the three that exist were the beginning of what Peake conceived would be a lengthy cycle, following his protagonist Titus Groan from cradle to grave, but Peake's untimely death interrupted the cycle at what is now commonly but erroneously called a trilogy.

Peake also wrote a number of nonsense poems, a children's story "Letters from a Lost Uncle", a radio play and "Mr Pye", a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero. He was born in China in 1911 of British parents. Oriental influences can be detected here and there in his work, not least in Gormenghast, which in many respects resembles a Tibetan lamasery more than the Gothic castle it is meant to be.

Peake visited Belsen in the aftermath of World War II in the capacity of war artist; this visit had a profound effect upon him. The first of the Gormenghast cycle, Titus Groan, was written in 1946. Gormenghast followed in 1950, and the final part, Titus Alone in 1959. Titus Alone was later revised by Langdon Jones to remove apparent inconsistencies introduced by the publisher's careless editing.

In 1984, BBC Radio 4 broadcast two 90-minute plays based on Titus Groan and Gormenghast, adapted by Brian Sibley and starring Sting as Steerpike and Freddie Jones as the Artist (narrator). A slightly abridged compilation of the two, running to 160 minutes, and entitled Titus Groan of Gormenghast, was broadcast on Christmas Day, 1992. BBC 7 repeated the original versions on 21 and 28 September, 2003.

In 2000, the BBC and WGBH Boston produced a miniseries, titled Gormenghast, based on the first two books of the trilogy.

Bibliography

• Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939)
• Shapes and Sounds (1941)
• Rhymes without Reason (1944)
• Titus Groan (1946)
• The Craft of the Lead Pencil (1946)
• Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions) (1948)
• Drawings by Mervyn Peake (1949)
• Gormenghast (1950)
• The Glassblowers (1950)
• Mr Pye (1953)
• Figures of Speech (1954)
• Titus Alone (1959)
• The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962)
• Poems and Drawings (1965)
• A Reverie of Bone and other Poems (1967)
• Selected Poems (1972)
• Michael Moorcock
• , a Peake appreciation by Langdon Jones, who edited some of his work
• , an introduction to his prose works