Miss Catherine McMahon writes: In 2010, the British Library acquired the archive of Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) with generous support from Friends of the National Libraries, the Art Fund, Friends of the British Library and individual donors. Mervyn Peake was one of those rare individuals who achieved equal greatness as both artist and writer. He is best known for his Gormenghast trilogy, for which he won the Heinemann Prize for Literature in 1951, but he also worked as a war artist and illustrated such classics as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, The Ancient Mariner and Treasure Island.
The British Library's acquisition of the archive allows researchers to view Peake's life and work as an organic, integrated whole and to understand the way his creative endeavours were balanced across a unique interplay of text and image.
The collection came to the Library in 28 containers and comprises 39 autograph Gormenghast notebooks as well as the complete set of original drawings for Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland. Dating from 1940 through to his death in 1968, the collection represents the majority of Peake's literary output and contains a significant amount of unpublished material, including correspondence with John Berger, Laurie Lee and C. S. Lewis. It also contains a collection of personal letters and postcards from Peake to his wife, Maeve Gilmore, including nine letters from Germany when he was commissioned as a war artist by The Leader magazine, observing war-crimes trials in Germany, and entering the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The acquisition of the Mervyn Peake archive builds upon the British Library's existing literary collections in a number of ways. The Library holds the autograph manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground, written and illustrated by Lewis Carroll, which was subsequently re-written and published in 1865 as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Peake's illustrations have been recently displayed alongside Carroll's in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures of the British Library Gallery for visitors to view, compare and enjoy.
It has also enhanced the British Library's outstanding holdings of British post-war literary collections. These collections include the literary and personal papers of David Gascoyne, George Barker, Alan Ross and Roy Fuller. The Lord Chamberlain's Plays Collection, the single largest manuscript collection in the Library, and the Laurence Olivier Archive both hold some material relating to Peake and his most successful play, The Wit to Woo. The Library also holds the Laurie Lee Archive, another of Peake's correspondents. Researchers now have the opportunity to access these complementary literary archive collections, which will open up avenues for new scholarship and allow a more comprehensive understanding of British literary culture of this period.
Facilitating public access and enjoyment to the contents of the archive has been a key aim of Library activity in the past year. Full cataloguing of its extensive contents is nearing completion and key items from the collection have been publicly exhibited. A collaboration with the University of Sheffield led to an exhibition entitled Mervyn Peake's Alice June - September 2010), attracting a large number of visitors to the newly-restored University Library exhibition gallery. Contents of the Mervyn Peake archive have also featured heavily in the BBC 4 series The Beauty of Books, broadcast in February 2011. To mark the centenary of Peake's birth, an exhibition at the British Library in June will also draw on the archive to explore Peake's extraordinary visual imagination.