Mervyn Peake, creator of Gormenghast, is now recognised as a brilliant novelist and artist. The Worlds of Mervyn Peake is at the British Library, London, from 5 July to 18 September 2011. www.bl.uk
The first I remember of Mervyn Peake’s drawings was on the dustjacket of his illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, remaindered for a few shillings in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford when I was a student in the early 1960s. It amazed me. The only Alice I knew in those days was John Tenniel‘s original Victorian miss with her grown-up face and strap shoes, tightly encased in voluminous layers of starched apron, striped skirt, stiff petticoats and long stockings. Peake re-saw her, more than a decade before Lolita, as a bored pre-teen nymphet, all tousled hair and bare limbs. His March Hare wears an OTT Ascot hat, his Walrus and Carpenter are a couple of specious street derelicts or druggies, his White Queen is a thumb-sized frump, no bigger than a chess-piece, crouched in the hearth on a perfectly ordinary, life-sized coal shovel. All are miracles of fantastic invention, linear control and exactitude.
