G. Peter Winnington

“...his conscience remained essentially that of a radical Christian. He admired Bunyan as well Blake. He was attracted to the imagery of pomp and ritual, but he was also deeply suspicious of it, always searching for what it hid. In those early pages of Titus Groan we find blind injustice, decadent ritual and haughty cruelty, folly, moral corruption, atrophied emotions and sensibilities, wretched hypocrisy and dumb despair; turbulence and terror are masked by pretence of activity, a reliance on a ritual which in the end has no function save to maintain the status quo - the power of the Groans. Yet here, too, is all the dusty glory of a decadent court, ancient mysteries, bizarre secrets, peculiar dependencies and relationships, old rivalries, a history already so encrusted with legend and myth that is no longer a record of events but a litany of blind faith.

This could be the China of Mervyn's boyhood translated to England. In that China the poor committed suicide on the surgery steps of doctors unable to cure them, and ancient wealth was displayed against a background of dreadful social suffering. It was an hallucinatory imperial twilight, common to all declining empires, which obscured that hardships of the many from the undemanding eyes of the privileged few - a light Mervyn detected in England, too. He was in many ways a conventional patriot, but he was also amused, frustrated and infuriated by the follies of the English ruling class. His own wartime experience of bureaucratic folly and the ignorant arrogance of leaders, the casual decisions which affected the lives and deaths of thousands, informed the pages of Titus Groan as he wrote it in various barracks, railway stations and transit camps while the army tried to make a gunner of him. Yet the novel never becomes a diatribe, never becomes a vehicle in which to express his own suffering.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“In his introduction to the first collection of his drawings Peake wrote, 'After all, there are no rules. With the wealth, skill, daring, vision of many centuries at one's back, yet one is ultimately quite alone. For it is one's ambition to create one's own world in a style germane to its substance, and to people it with its native forms and denizens that never were before, yet have their roots in one's experience. As the earth was thrown from the sun, so from the earth the artist must fling out into space, complete from pole to pole, his own world which, whatsoever form it takes, is the colour of the globe it flew from, as the world itself is coloured by the sun.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art