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Mervyn Peake 'visual archive' acquired by British Library

From a sketch of a scheming Steerpike in Gormenghast to one of Jim Hawkins alone on the shore of Treasure Island, more than 300 original illustrations by writer and artist Mervyn Peake have been acquired by the British Library.

Peake, who died in 1968, is best known for his gothic fantasy series Gormenghast, but he was also “arguably the finest children’s illustrator of the mid-20th century”, said the British Library. His own books for children, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor and Letters from a Lost Uncle, as well as his illustrations for classic works of English literature, combined “technical mastery with an innate ability to evoke fear, delight and wonderment in young readers”, said the institution, and “redefined the cosy nature of children’s book illustrations”.

Unpublished early works by Peake, such as The Moccus Book, which combines nonsense verse with his images of outlandish anthropomorphic characters, form part of the “visual archive”. They sit alongside Peake’s childhood drawings of his favourite book, Treasure Island, and his illustrations for other classic works including Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and the Brothers Grimm, as well as 10 illustrations of Gormenghast characters. His earliest surviving drawing, depicting people he encountered on a Sunday afternoon walk while living in China, aged seven, is also included.

The acquisition from the Peake estate follows the purchase of Peake’s literary archive in 2010, with the British Library positioning Peake in the “great tradition of writer-artists like William Blake and Edward Lear for whom drawing is integrated into their writing process”. Peake’s son, the artist and writer Fabian Peake, described the collection as “covering a vast range of human qualities and attributes – from the absurd to the portentous; from the loosely informal sketches to the heights of his technical abilities as a draughtsman”.

Curator Zoë Wilcox said: “It wasn’t until more recently that we had the opportunity to acquire this part of the archive to join the literary manuscripts, which is brilliant, because when you look at Peake’s creative process, you really can’t separate his writing from his drawing. We know that he drew whenever he got stuck with his writing, in order to help him imagine what his characters might say and how they might speak. We can see that from his Gormenghast notebooks that we already have. It’s amazing now to bring these together so that researchers can look at his creative process in more detail and examine his synaesthesia – one sense for him would spark another sense.”

Wilcox said that Peake’s work on Treasure Island lay at the heart of the collection, from his watercolours of the story as a teenager to his illustrations for the 1949 edition, described by critics as “tense, eerie and dramatic” and “one of the few editions which have come near to meeting the demands of the author’s text”.

“He was very sensitive to the fact that he was reinterpreting someone else’s text, and he left a lot to the imagination of the reader,” said Wilcox. “He’s credited with bringing a darker feel to Treasure Island, and bringing out the evil of the pirates.”

The illustrations also reveal Peake’s abiding fascination with islands, with the surreal early painting Floating Islands showing waves topped by land. “Islands are an obsession with Peake all through his work – a visual metaphor but also the sense of isolation that he often evokes through his writing and through his art, whether it’s Castle Gormenghast as a kind of island removed from the everyday world, or the physical, literal islands that appear in his pirate stories or his nonsense books,” said Wilcox.