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Mervyn Laurence Peake (9 July 1911 – 17 November 1968) was a British writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.
Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children ( Letters from a Lost Uncle, 1948), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye (1953), a relatively tightly structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.
Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived in London, and he was commissioned to produce portraits of well-known people. For a short time at the end of World War II he was commissioned by various newspapers to depict war scenes. A collection of his drawings is still in the possession of his family. Although he gained little popular success in his lifetime, his work was highly respected by his peers, and his friends included C. S. Lewis, Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene. His works are now included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and The National Archives.
In 2008, The Times named Peake among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
The Peakes were given leave to visit England just before World War I in 1914 and returned to China in 1916. Mervyn Peake attended Tianjin Grammar School until the family left for England in December 1922 via the Trans-Siberian Railway. He would later write a novella about this time, titled The White Chief of the Umzimbooboo Kaffirs. Peake never returned to China but it has been noted that Chinese influences can be detected in his works, not least in the castle of Gormenghast itself, which in some respects echoes his birthplace Kuling, as well as the ancient walled city of Beijing and the enclosed compound where he grew up in Tianjin. It is also likely that his early exposure to the contrasts between the lives of the Europeans and of the Chinese, and between the poor and the wealthy in China, also exerted an influence on the Gormenghast books.
His education continued at Eltham College, Mottingham (1923–1929), where his talents were encouraged by his English teacher, Eric Drake. Peake completed his formal education at Croydon College in the autumn of 1929, and then from December 1929 to 1933 at the Royal Academy Schools, where he first painted in oils. By this time he had written his first long poem, A Touch o' the Ash. In 1931, he had a painting accepted for display by the Royal Academy and exhibited his work with the so-called "Soho Group".
In 1936, he returned to London and was commissioned to design the sets and costumes for The Insect Play, and his work was acclaimed in The Sunday Times. He also began teaching life drawing at Westminster School of Art where he met the painter Maeve Gilmore, whom he married in 1937. They had three children: Sebastian (1940–2012), Fabian (born 1942), and Clare (born 1949).
Peake had a very successful exhibition of paintings at the Calmann Gallery in London in 1938 and his first book, the self-illustrated children's pirate romance Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (based on a story he had written around 1936), was first published in 1939 by Country Life. In December 1939, he was commissioned by Chatto & Windus to illustrate a children's book, Ride a Cock Horse and Other Nursery Rhymes, published for the Christmas market in 1940.
In April 1942, after his requests for commissions as a war artist – or even leave to depict war damage in London – had been consistently refused, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was sent to Southport Hospital. That autumn he was taken on as a graphic artist by the Ministry of Information for a period of six months to work on propaganda illustrations. The next spring he was invalided out of the Army. In 1943 he was commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee, WAAC, to paint glassblowing at the Chance Brothers factory in Smethwick where cathode ray tubes for early radar sets were being produced. Peake was next given a full-time, three-month WAAC contract to depict various factory subjects and was also asked to submit a large painting showing RAF pilots being debriefed. Some of these paintings are on permanent display in Manchester Art Gallery whilst other examples are in the Imperial War Museum collection. (2026). 9781904897668, Imperial War Museum. ISBN 9781904897668
Peake designed the logo for Pan Books. The publishers offered him either a flat fee of £10 or a royalty of one farthing per book. On the advice of Graham Greene, who told him that paperback books were a passing fad that would not last, Peake opted for the £10.As recounted by Clare Peake on the BBC Radio 4 programme Midweek, 22 June 2011.
A book of nonsense poems, Rhymes Without Reason, was published in 1944 and was described by John Betjeman as "outstanding". Shortly after the war ended in 1945, Edgar Ainsworth, the art editor of Picture Post, commissioned Peake to visit France and Germany for the magazine. With writer Tom Pocock, Peake was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazism concentration camp at Belsen, where the remaining prisoners, too sick to be moved, were dying before his very eyes. He made several drawings, but not surprisingly he found the experience profoundly harrowing, and expressed in deeply felt poems the ambiguity of turning their suffering into art.
In 1946, the family moved to Sark, where Peake continued to write and illustrate, and Maeve painted. Gormenghast was published in 1950,Robert Irwin, "Peake, Mervyn (Laurence)", St. James Guide To Fantasy Writers, ed. David Pringle, London, St. James Press, 1996, , pp. 469–70.John Clute, "The Titus Groan Trilogy", in Frank N. Magill (ed.), Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Vol. 4. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, Inc., 1983 (pp. 1947–1953). . and the family moved back to England, settling in Smarden, Kent. Peake taught part-time at the Central School of Art, began his comic novel Mr Pye, and renewed his interest in theatre. His father died that year and left his house in Hillside Gardens in Wallington, Surrey to Peake. Mr Pye was published in 1953, and he later adapted it as a radio play. The BBC broadcast other plays of his in 1954 and 1956.
Titus Alone was published in 1959 and was revised in 1970 by Langdon Jones, an editor of New Worlds, to remove apparent inconsistencies introduced by the publisher's careless editing. Jones, also a composer, set The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb to music. A 1995 edition of all three completed Gormenghast novels includes a very short fragment of the beginning of what would have been the fourth Gormenghast novel, Titus Awakes, as well as a listing of events and themes he wanted to address in that and later Gormenghast novels.
A 2003 study published in JAMA Neurology assessed that Peake's death was the result of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB).
His work, especially the Gormenghast series, became much better known and more widely appreciated after his death. They have since been translated into more than two dozen languages.
The first blue plaque on Sark was unveiled in Peake's honour at the Gallery Stores in the Avenue on 30 August 2019.
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 1986, Mr Pye was adapted as a four-part Channel 4 miniseries starring Derek Jacobi.
In 2000, the BBC and WGBH-TV co-produced a lavish miniseries, titled Gormenghast, based on the first two books of the series. It starred Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Steerpike, Neve McIntosh as Fuchsia, June Brown as Nannie Slagg, Ian Richardson as Lord Groan, Christopher Lee as Flay, Richard Griffiths as Swelter, Warren Mitchell as Barquentine, Celia Imrie as Countess Gertrude, Lynsey Baxter and Zoë Wanamaker as the twins Cora and Clarice, and John Sessions as Dr Prunesquallor. The supporting cast included Olga Sosnovska, Stephen Fry and Eric Sykes, and the series is also notable as the last screen performance by comedy legend Spike Milligan (as the Headmaster).
A 30-minute TV short film entitled A Boy in Darkness (also made in 2000 and adapted from Peake's novella) was the first production from the BBC Drama Lab. It was set in a "virtual" computer-generated world created by young computer game designers, and starred Jack Ryder (from EastEnders) as Titus, with Terry Jones ( Monty Python's Flying Circus) narrating.
Irmin Schmidt, founder of seminal German Krautrock group Can, wrote an opera called Gormenghast, based on the novels; it was first performed in Wuppertal Opera, Germany, in November 1998. A number of early songs by New Zealand rock group Split Enz were inspired by Peake's work. The song "The Drowning Man", by British band The Cure, is inspired by events in Gormenghast, and the song "Lady Fuchsia" by another British band, Strawbs, is also based on events in the novels.
Peake's play The Cave, which dates from the mid-1950s, was given a first public reading at the Blue Elephant Theatre in Camberwell (London) in 2009, and had its world premiere in the same theatre, directed by Aaron Paterson, on 19 October 2010.
In 2011, Brian Sibley adapted the story again, this time as six one-hour episodes broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as the Classic Serial starting on 10 July 2011. The serial was titled The History of Titus Groan and adapted all three novels written by Mervyn Peake and the recently discovered concluding volume, Titus Awakes, completed by his widow, Maeve Gilmore. It starred Luke Treadaway as Titus, David Warner as the Artist and Carl Prekopp as Steerpike. It also starred Paul Rhys, Miranda Richardson, James Fleet, Tamsin Greig, Fenella Woolgar, Adrian Scarborough and Mark Benton among others.
Sting owned the film rights to the Gormenghast novels for a brief period in the 1980s, during which he discussed the possibility of adapting the novels into a series of , but he abandoned the idea after declaring the Radio 4 audio drama as ideal. As of 2015, author Neil Gaiman was in talks to adapt the novels for the big screen.
Peake is considered to be one of the Big Three of (secondary world) Fantasy, along with J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. Their equivalents in the science fiction genre are Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein.
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