PEAKE, Mervyn.

£45,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Revised typescript of Gormenghast, Chapters 8-19. Comprising the longest extant section of the author's revised typescript. Only the beginning of Gormenghast survives in this stage of composition. The Peake archive at the British Library includes chapters 1-7, and the present manuscript immediately follows for chapters 8-19. The rest is lost. Manuscript material for Peake's fantasy novels is extremely rare.The history of the writing of Gormenghast relies on the Mervyn Peake archive now at the British Library. The first draft is a handwritten sequence on lined paper. It is haphazard with added strips of paper, deletions, additions, revisions, and accompanied by miscellaneous doodles, sketches, and full drawings. The full novel seemingly exists in the archive in this first stage of composition. It is a highly complex first draft that was handed to Peake's typist (occasional comments include "please take no notice of the diagnol [sic] lines which follow" and "please leave space to end of page for completion").Peake's typist, Hilda Neal, then provided a version which Peake revised in what was evidently a laborious and detailed writing process. The Peake archive at the British Library includes a letter from Neal to Peake complaining about the legibility of the first draft ("would you please re-write the bottom portion of this page, as I cannot read it, and certainly have not the time to decipher it").When working on the typescript, Peake was occasionally resident at Stone Hall. To

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