Mervyn Peake - Early Life

Early Life

Mervyn Peake was born of British parents in Kuling (Lushan) in Jiangxi Province of central China in 1911 only three months before the revolution and the founding of the Republic of China. His 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.

The Peakes were given leave to visit England just before World War I in 1914 and returned to China in 1916. Mervyn Peake attended Tientsin Grammar School until the family left for England in December 1922 via the Trans-Siberian Railway. About this time he wrote a novella, The White Chief of the Umzimbooboo Kaffirs. Mervyn Peake never returned to China but it has been noted that Chinese influences can be detected in Peake's works, not least in the castle of Gormenghast itself, which in some respects echoes the ancient walled city of Peking (Beijing) as well as the enclosed compound where he grew up in Tientsin (Tianjin). It is also likely that his early exposure to the contrasts between the lives of the Europeans, and of the Chinese, and between the poor and the wealthy in China also exerted an influence on the Gormenghast books.

His education continued at Eltham College, Mottingham (1923-1929), where his talents were encouraged by his English teacher, Eric Drake. He completed his formal education at Croydon School of Art in the autumn of 1929 and then at the Royal Academy Schools from December 1929 to 1933, where he first painted in oils. By this time he had written his first long poem, 'A Touch o' the Ash'. In 1931 he had a painting accepted for display by the Royal Academy and exhibited his work with the so-called "Soho Group".