A study into the life and practice of Mervyn Peake.

[The Illustrator is like] ‘a Prince who with a line of Kings for lineage can make no gesture that does not recall some royal ancestor.’- Mervyn Peake (1)

On the 9^th of July 1911, in Kuling, a small hill town in the Kiang-Hsi Province of China, Mervyn Peake was born to Congregationalist Missionary parents, and spent most of his first eleven years in Tientsin, south east of Peking (Beijing). The family moved back to England in 1923, and settled in Wallington, Surrey. 

He started studying at the Croydon School of Art before enrolling at the Royal Academy of Art in 1929, where he primarily focused on painting, one of which was chosen for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1931. In 1933 Peake moved to the Channel Island of Sark, following the suggestion of one of his former teachers and spent the next two years there. He exhibited work with the Sark Group in galleries in London and Paris, but in 1935 moved back to London and took up a teaching position at the Westminster School of Art.

In 1936 he met Maeve Gilmore when she started her first day at the Art school and they married on the 1^st December 1937. Peake had his first one-man show at the Calmann gallery in London during the following year, and his first book Captain Slaughterboard was published by Country Life in 1939.

In 1940 he moved to Sussex and his first child, Sebastian, was born. In the same year he began writing Titus Groan, had Ride a cock-horse and other Nursery Rhymes published, and joined the Royal Artillery. His second son, Fabian, was born in 1942 and Peake left the army that year.

He was commissioned by ‘The Leader’ magazine as a war Artist in 1945 and visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where he compiled several drawings of the dying inmates, and gathered ideas for a future collection of poems.

Titus Groan was published in 1946 by Eyre and Spottiswoode, and he moved the family to Sark where he rented a large house previously used by the commanding officer of the German Occupation Force. In 1949 his daughter, Clare, was born. 

In 1950 Gormenghast was published, for which he won the Heinemann Prize for Literature in 1951 along with The Glassblowers. He was consequently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The family moved back to Wallington, Surrey, in 1952.

Titus Groan was adapted for BBC Radio in 1956, and Peake wrote a play, The Wit to Woo, that was performed at the Arts Theatre in London in 1957. The play received poor reviews and Peake suffered a nervous breakdown.

In 1959 Titus Alone was published. Mervyn Peake died on the 17^th November 1968 having suffered the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease for many years.(2)

His affinity for Illustration was present throughout his childhood; many of his first drawings were completed in the margins of his school exercise books. His love of novels such as ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Under the Serpent’s Fang’ exposed him to such Illustrators as Stanley L Wood, whose work Peake greatly admired.(3) One can see similarities in the use of line, mark-making, composition and humour that are continually evident in much of his work.

As a sixteen year old (1927) Peake produced a 27 page series of illustrations for poems by Walter De La Mare. These use clean and confident lines, and many of the characters are expressive in their movements. Some consider these early examples to resemble the style of E H Shepard, Illustrator of Winnie the Pooh.(4)