Famed worldwide for his Gormenghast trilogy, Mervyn Peake was also an illustrator of rare and wondrous talent, whose editions of Treasure Island and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are universally admired. In the 1940s he was commissioned to produce a set of 70 pen-and-ink drawings to accompany Lewis Carroll's two classics, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. They are among his best work as an illustrator. Unavailable in any edition since 1978, these extraordinary illustrations, many of which were drawn on poor quality wartime paper, have been restored to their former clarity and crispness by a combination of old-fashioned craft and the latest computer technology. They are now meticulously reproduced, for the first time, as they were meant to be seen. This exquisite two-volume set is the first edition to do justice to two great English eccentrics.

 

This book was recognised in the Big Read Top 100 category by the Bbc Book Awards.

This book is part of a book series called Alice .

There are 192 pages in this book. This book was published 2001 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC .

Mervyn Peake (1911 - 1968) was one of the most important British novelists of the late twentieth century. Although best known for his Gormenghast trilogy, he was also widely admired for his work as an artist and illustrator, including his work on Grimm's Household Tales, which was republished by the British Library in 2012. J. P. Martin was born in Scarborough in 1880, the son and grandson of Methodist ministers. He had no great ambition to have his Uncle books published. To begin with they were not books, just stories which he used to tell his children in his deep Yorkshire voice, chuckling unashamedly at his own jokes. It was only when his children were grown up that he was persuaded to write them down, and it was his daughter who became determined that they should reach a wider audience and started submitting them to publishers. The books, with their anarchic spirit, were ahead of their time and it took twenty years before they finally appeared in print. Intriguingly, one publisher rejected the books on the grounds that they were amoral and said Uncle was 'a fascist' whereas The Listener, reviewing the first book, said "Uncle is a savage attack on a capitalist society. " His daughter thinks of Uncle, the rich benefactor of all his neighbours, as the fantasy of a poor man, her father, who spent most of his life in slums longing but unable to alleviate the poverty by which he was surrounded. Whatever his motives, the author himself was unconscious of them. "Lots of it came to me in dreams," he said. "I would come downstairs in the morning and remember what I had been dreaming about - and there was another chapter. " The author seems not to have been greatly affected by publication. "When your work is your calling," he said, "you don't worry much about anything else. " Even so, he was obviously delighted by the visits of local reporters and the BBC and, in particular, the children who came to see him. In all, six Uncle books were published in the series, the last in 1973, seven years after his death. Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898. Alice in Wonderland was first published in 1865.