It is forty years since the death of Mervyn Peake (1911-68), the author of the much-loved "Gormenghast" novels. To mark the anniversary this first comprehensive edition of Peake's poetry is published. Of the more than 230 poems in the collection, over 80 are printed for the first time. Peake emerges as a compelling poet, with an acute sense of his responsibilities as an artist, passionately engaged with current events, from unemployment in the 1930s to the horrors of the London Blitz and the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. He is also a fine love-poet and a sensitive observer of the human form. Readers who love the world of Peake's novels, and those who are new to his work, will discover here one of the great originals of the twentieth century.
Mervyn Peake was a novelist, poet, playwright, painter, illustrator and children’s writer. Born in a small European settlement called Kuling, on 9 July, 1911 Peake spent most of his childhood south of Peking, in Tientsin, China, where he attended the Tientsin Grammar School. His family returned to England in 1923 when his father set up a medical practice in Wallington, Surrey. After a brief spell at the Croydon School of Art Peake enrolled at the Royal Academy in December, 1929. By 1935, when Peake began teaching at Westminster School of Art, he had already exhibited his work on several occasions in London and on the island of Sark. 1938 saw Peake’s first solo exhibition, and the following year witnessed the publication of his first book,
Captain Slaughterboard. During the war Peake joined the Royal Artillery, but was given special dispensation by his commanding officer to finish his novel
Titus Groan, the first part of his celebrated Gormenghast trilogy (although the trilogy was originally planned as part of a larger cycle). At the end of the war Peake travelled to Germany and France to illustrate Tom Pocock’s articles for the magazine
New Leader. This included a tip to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, where he drew the dying inmates and collected ideas for his future poetry.
Titus Groan was published in 1946, followed by
Gormenghast in 1950. At the age of 46 Peake developed Parkinson’s disease, but was still able to complete
Titus Alone which was subsequently published in 1959. Mervyn Peake died on November 17th, 1968, at his brother-in-law’s carehome in Burcot, near Oxford. Nowadays Peake is best known for the three novels which make up the Gormenghast trilogy. However, prior to their publication he was best known his poems, paintings, drawings, and book illustrations.
Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, Robert Maslen has taught at Universities in Oxford, London and Exeter. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, where he teaches an MLitt in Creative Writing, and has been Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, NH, the University of St Thomas, MN, and the University of Lund, Sweden. He has published articles on science fiction and renaissance literature, two books,
Shakespeare and Comedy and
Elizabethan Fictions, and is the editor of
Mervyn Peake: Collected Poems and, with Peter Winnington,
Complete Nonsense (both published by Carcanet).
