27 Facts About Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, artist, poet, and illustrator.

Mervyn Peake 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.

Mervyn Peake wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children, stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye, a relatively tightly structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.

Mervyn 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.

Mervyn Peake's works are now included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and The National Archives.

Mervyn Peake was born of British parents in Kuling located on top of Mount Lu in Jiujiang in 1911, only three months before the revolution and the founding of the Republic of China.

Mervyn Peake's father, Ernest Cromwell Peake, was a medical missionary doctor with the London Missionary Society of the Congregationalist tradition, and his mother, Amanda Elizabeth Powell, had come to China as a missionary assistant.

Mervyn Peake attended Tientsin Grammar School until the family left for England in December 1922 via the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Mervyn 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, the ancient walled city of Beijing, as well as the enclosed compound where he grew up in Tianjin.

Mervyn Peake's education continued at Eltham College, Mottingham, where his talents were encouraged by his English teacher, Eric Drake.

Mervyn Peake completed his formal education at Croydon School of Art in the autumn of 1929, and then from December 1929 to 1933 at the Royal Academy Schools, where he first painted in oils.

Mervyn Peake first moved to Sark in 1932 where his former teacher Eric Drake was setting up an artists' colony.

In 1934, Mervyn Peake exhibited with the Sark artists both in the Sark Gallery built by Drake and at the Cooling Galleries in London, and in 1935 he exhibited at the Royal Academy and at the Leger Galleries in London.

Mervyn Peake began teaching life drawing at Westminster School of Art where he met the painter Maeve Gilmore, whom he married in 1937.

Mervyn 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, was first published in 1939 by Country Life.

Mervyn Peake imagined An Exhibition by the Artist, Adolf Hitler, in which horrific images of war with ironic titles were offered as "artworks" by the Nazi leader.

Mervyn Peake was next given a full-time, three-month WAAC contract to depict various factory subjects and was asked to submit a large painting showing RAF pilots being debriefed.

Shortly after the war ended in 1945, Edgar Ainsworth, the art editor of Picture Post, commissioned Mervyn Peake to visit France and Germany for the magazine.

Mervyn Peake 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 Mervyn Peake continued to write and illustrate, and Maeve painted.

Mervyn Peake taught part-time at the Central School of Art, began his comic novel Mr Pye, and renewed his interest in theatre.

Mervyn Peake's father died that year and left his house in Hillside Gardens in Wallington, Surrey to Peake.

Mervyn Peake placed much hope in his play The Wit to Woo, which was finally staged in London's West End in 1957, but it was a critical and commercial failure.

Mervyn Peake was showing unmistakable early symptoms of dementia, for which he was given electroconvulsive therapy, to little avail.

Mervyn Peake was buried in the churchyard of St Mary's in the village of Burpham, West Sussex.

The Collected Poems of Mervyn Peake was published by Carcanet Press in June 2008.