The Kingdom in His Head

Aran Ward Sell reconsiders the legacy and complex overlapping ‘failures’ of Mervyn Peake’s final novel, ‘Titus Alone.’

By Aran Ward SellJanuary 19, 2026

• SF

• Literary Criticism

TITUS GROAN, self-exiled Earl of Gormenghast, has been tricked. He has spurned Cheeta, the scientist’s daughter, and in vengeance, she has concocted a “farewell party” for Titus, which features an elaborate masquerade to break his spirit: the play in the Black House. Cheeta has created “an atmosphere most conducive to madness”: actors wear the likenesses of Titus’s friends, relatives, and old enemies from his far-off home, Gormenghast Castle. The trick works: Titus is deceived. As he watches the play, an offstage chorus torments him, questioning his sanity, until Titus lets out “an inward cry of desolation.” But it is an earlier cry, which Titus let out in a strange forest, thinking himself alone, that expresses the source and depth of his anguish: “O give me back the kingdom in my head.”

The play in the Black House comes late in Titus Alone (1959), the third and final novel featuring Titus Groan by the British author and artist Mervyn Peake. These works are now often referred to as the Gormenghast trilogy. The two prior novels, Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950), are rightly hailed as classics of fantasy, gothicism, and midcentury literature writ large. Peake’s contemporaneous literary admirers, his disciple Michael Moorcock recounts, included Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and Anthony Burgess. His association with the fantasy genre is more recent, and stems from publishers’ hunger for English fantasy trilogies following the global success, in the 1960s, of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–55).

Peake’s series, retroactively regarded as a “trilogy,” offers an unsettling gothic shadow to Tolkien’s more sunlit work, and Adam Roberts has called both series “arguably the most important Fantasy works published in the twentieth century.” Set against Tolkien’s moral simplicity and hard-fought heroism, Peake became the figurehead of an alternative, darker fantastic tradition: fewer elves, more owls; fewer battles, more murders; less myth and legend, more Shakespeare and Dickens. Later writers in this Peakean tradition include Moorcock, Angela Carter, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Susanna Clarke, whose Piranesi (2020), with its mournful halls and gentle surrealism, recalls the unreality of Peake’s Gormenghast Castle. Illustrators such as Raymond Briggs, Quentin Blake, and Chris Riddell also laud his influence.

Titus Groan and Gormenghast, unlike Titus Alone, are set in the crumbling, ritual-bound Gormenghast Castle. Titus is born as Titus Groan begins and, still in infancy, becomes the 77th Earl of Gormenghast by the end. Gormenghast then chronicles Titus’s adolescence, ending when he flees the weighty obligations of his home. The castle’s evocative name provides the series’ now-common title, the Gormenghast trilogy, though Peake preferred the “Titus books.” The preeminent characteristic of Titus Groan and Gormenghast is eeriness. Mark Fisher defines the eerie as “a failure of absence or […] a failure of presence”: either nothing is present where something should be or something is present where nothing should be. Indeed, Peake’s masterfully eerie Titus books have their own, deeply Gothic absence: Titus Alone is widely considered both a failed novel and a failed conclusion to the series, especially when the grouping is understood as a trilogy. Consider Greer Gilman’s evocative description: “Mervyn Peake’s unfinished Gormenghast trilogy is a babble of voices: a mad Goth Dickensian, patter song, twitterings.” How can a trilogy be unfinished when, by definition, it comprises three volumes? The answer lies in Titus Alone’s failures, and its creator’s failing health.

Peake died in 1968, at just 57, from a dreadful neurological condition that left him institutionalized and ravaged his ability to speak and write. By the 1960s, as Raymond Briggs attests, Peake’s speech was incomprehensible. He underwent brutal electroshock therapy, which his biographer, the late G. Peter Winnington, describes as “no longer used except in extreme cases. One of its side-effects is temporary loss of memory. […] Mervyn begged to be spared it.” His condition was treated as a form of Parkinson’s disease; however, medical professor Demetrios J. Sahlas offered the sensitive posthumous assessment that Peake suffered not from Parkinson’s but from “Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB).”

It is widely suggested that Peake’s illness began with his self-perceived failure as a family breadwinner. In 1957, he attempted to write a popular play, The Wit to Woo. Peake’s son, Sebastian, noted that his father collapsed the day after The Wit to Woo’s “indifferent” reviews came in, never to be well again. Colin N. Manlove claims that the play’s “failure brought on a nervous collapse in Peake which preluded his long illness.” The provocateur Quentin Crisp, although a Peake devotee, even tactlessly claimed that Peake’s gothicism contributed to his “madness”: “[A]ll that darkness, dear, gets to you in the end,” Moorcock quotes Crisp as saying (whether a direct quotation or arch paraphrase is unclear). Sahlas cautions, however, against assuming any poetically apt catalyst for Peake’s decline. “Although [the post–Wit to Woo] breakdown was attributed to his temperament, symptoms of psychosis (such as delusions and hallucinations) tend to occur early and represent another core feature of DLB,” the doctor notes.

Whether Peake’s failed play was causal, contributory, or coincidental to his dementia, his deteriorating mind undoubtedly affected his final published work. Titus Alone is generally treated as a failed attempt at a third Gormenghast novel, damaged irreparably by Peake’s diminishing faculties. Sahlas cites many critics who relate the “progressive disintegration and fragmentation of Peake’s writing […] in Titus Alone” to his dementia. This disintegration is undeniable. As Manlove describes elsewhere, Titus Alone’s “sentences are often brief: often too they are without finite verbs, fragments of syntax.” By the end of the book, many chapters are under a page long; chapter 100 is a set of questions followed by a single paragraph. Titus Alone was barely finished at all: Winnington recounts how Peake’s devoted wife and constant champion, the artist Maeve Gilmore, typed the closing chapters from a manuscript in which “the handwriting progressively deteriorates” as Peake’s mind shuts down.

It is not only the formal aspects of Titus Alone that are discontinuous with Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Titus Alone also departs from the medieval-meets-Victorian setting of Gormenghast Castle and sends the young aristocrat, Titus, into a world sometimes called science-fictional, but which might better be considered a modernist fantasy: the geography is unknowable and the cities unnamed, but the technologies Titus encounters are—excepting some chillingly futuristic surveillance tech—recognizably 20th-century: society parties, elevators, courtrooms, cars, airplanes, and parachutes. He also has sexual encounters, with the “monumental” lady Juno, that are more anatomically precise than anything in the earlier books: Juno’s “marvellous bosom” causes Titus to feel “his scrotum tightening […] His cock trembled like a harp-string.” This does not help Titus Alone fit easily alongside Tolkien’s chaste, high-minded saga. These departures in subject matter do not directly reflect Peake’s condition as the fragmentary chapters and truncated sentences do. And yet, Winnington tells us, part of editors’ attempts to salvage a coherent novel from the Titus Alone manuscript was to insist “that the ‘science fiction’ aspects of the story should be played down.” By this stage, “Mervyn was beyond rewriting,” and Gilmore initially accepted the revisions.

What complicates this diagnosis of Peake’s work is that he always intended Titus Alone to depart from its predecessors’ themes. Sahlas, probably accurately, writes that “the fragmentation of Peake’s work probably represents bursts of creative output truncated by lapses in his ability to concentrate.” And yet fragmentation, as literary modernism shows, is a potent literary device. It is no stretch to suggest modernist influence in Peake’s work: Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader (1925) was an acknowledged inspiration during the writing of Titus Groan. Even allowing, however, that Titus Alone’s fragmentation is both unintended and deleterious to the story, its subject matter cannot be considered likewise. Readers and publishers would doubtless prefer a third novel of Gormenghast Castle, a trilogy-ending medievalist fantasy epic, but Gormenghast’s story is fully told in two volumes, with the central plotline not Titus’s upbringing but the murderous rise of his adversary, Steerpike, from kitchen boy to fascistic quasi-ruler to a violent death at Titus’s hand.

With Steerpike dead, Castle Gormenghast’s narrative arc was complete, and Peake did not plan to return to it: Winnington refers to Titus Alone as “but the first of several volumes of Titus’s adventures outside Gormenghast.” Peake’s list of topics and characters for future Titus novels included “Snows,” “Scents,” “Pirates,” “Psychiatrists,” “Affluence,” and “Echoes”—the inhabitants of Gormenghast Castle do not feature. (Gilmore, who speculated that the next book might be called Titus Awakes, privately wrote the semi-autobiographical Search Without End, with a Peake-like protagonist named Titus. Although Gilmore did not seek publication, Search Without End was cynically released, decades posthumously, as Titus Awakes: The Lost Book of Gormenghast, in 2011; as Winnington maintained, this did not “correspond to […] her final intentions.”)

Moorcock led the campaign to rehabilitate Titus Alone after its brutal initial reception, casting himself, along with the composer and writer Langdon Jones, as the defenders of Peake’s literary honor. Moorcock characterizes the original edit of Titus Alone as the work of an “uncomprehending copy editor [who] cut it to pieces.” Jones discovered an as yet unbutchered manuscript in Gilmore’s possession and reedited it. Moorcock and Gilmore then campaigned to have Jones’s edit published. Gilmore, Jones, and Moorcock did Peake, readers, and the literary tradition great service by undoing the damage done to Titus Alone, ensuring that the contemporary reader can encounter what Jones calls a “much more powerful expression” than the sanitized original publication. Moorcock hails the 1970 edit as “much improved” and also ventures the riskier proposition that “in its restored form the novel proved far better than critics originally supposed.” But the “restored form” did not restore Titus Alone’s reputation. Readers still find the book incoherent, both formally and thematically, and lacking the melancholy atmosphere and richly grotesque caricatures of Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Titus Alone has been reclaimed, but it is not a lost masterpiece. Claiming it as such willfully overlooks the novel’s shortcomings and rings just as hollow as dismissing it wholesale.

To take Titus Alone seriously, we must diminish neither these shortcomings nor Peake’s intentional creative departures. Does it live up to Titus Groan and Gormenghast? No, but few novels do, and it offers something different from either. Do its modern technologies and fragmented form reflect Peake’s artistic intentions or his damaged faculties? Both, and neither. This binary leaves no room for a third possibility—that Peake’s artistry continued to develop even as dementia affected his craft. While Titus Alone is regarded, not without reason, as a failed novel, perhaps it is also a novel about failure.

Among the abridgments and shortcomings of Titus Alone, we can also read Peake’s experience of dementia and the treatments he underwent expressed in Titus’s own terrors. Jones, who patiently restored the manuscript, is one of few critics to note this. He relates the book’s themes both to Peake’s losing battle with dementia and to his experiences as a war artist. In 1945, in the newly liberated Nazi concentration camp at Belsen, Peake witnessed former prisoners dying, too sick to be saved. “Peake seemed to regard evil and tragedy as a tangible force,” Jones writes, “and [Titus Alone] reflects a struggle that was taking place in reality, when Peake himself was facing a horror more dreadful and more protracted than that endured by Titus, and to which, after ten years, he succumbed.”

It is Titus Alone’s ending that, Jones notes, required the most counter-surgery from the initial edit. This sequence begins at the heart of the play in the Black House. Earlier, Cheeta tends Titus while he convalesces from various misadventures, and he mutters about Gormenghast Castle in his delirium. Cheeta comprehends Titus’s home as in opposition to her rationalist upbringing: against the “cold centre of elegance and a life of scheduled pleasure,” Gormenghast appears to Cheeta as “the gulches of a barbarous region. A world of capture and escape. Of violence and fear. Of love and hate. Yet above all, of an underlying calm. A calm built upon a rock-like certainty and belief in some immemorial tradition.”

Perhaps nowhere else is the difference between the castle-set early novels and the city-set Titus Alone so clearly delineated by Peake. Titus, once recovered, desires Cheeta only sexually—when she spurns his carnal, misogynistic advances, he leaves her in her scientist father’s factory and roams the wilderness. Here he cries out “to the whole forest […] give me my secrets back … for this is foreign soil. O give me back the kingdom in my head.” Cheeta, angered by Titus’s rejection of her and her modernity, then devises the play as “a way to bring young Titus to the dust; a way to hurt him.” She recruits “a hundred or more […] guests, besides scores of workmen,” to aid in the deceit, and finds a perfect location, the ruined Black House, which is described with much of Peake’s old visual flourish as having “a darkness that owed nothing to the night, and seemed to dye the day.”

Once Titus arrives, the play opens with a throne adorned with “seven owls.” These are props, but Cheeta creates the impression that they let out “a long-drawn hoot.” The owl hoot resonates for Titus—his father, Lord Sepulchrave, believes himself an owl in the madness that prefigures his death in Titus Groan—and as an echo of The Wit to Woo. Not only does the title of Peake’s play evoke an owl hoot, but the play itself opens with a stage direction for “the hooting of an owl.” Fittingly, Mark Fisher’s first example of an eerie “failure of absence” is the apparent agency, where there should be none, heard in the cry of a bird: “A bird’s cry is eerie if […] there is some kind of intent at work, a form of intent that we do not usually associate with a bird.”

In Titus Alone, as with The Wit to Woo in Peake’s own reality, the play goes disastrously wrong. Cheeta’s illusions collapse, and Titus is rescued by companions he has undeservingly gathered along the novel’s course. But first, Cheeta succeeds in tormenting Titus with psychological tortures designed to “derange once and for all the boy’s bewildered mind.” The “chorus” of actors’ voices crashes upon Titus, diagnosing him with a neurological decline that he cannot himself perceive. “He does not realize how much we love him,” the disembodied voices soothe, before striking their cruelest blow: “It is a pity about your brain,” they taunt. Titus asks, “[W]hat’s wrong with my brain?” and Cheeta and the chorus reply: “It is on the turn.” Their voices, then, turn from cruel mockery to even crueler condescension, as the narrator recounts: “[T]he authoritative voice rose again beyond the juniper fire. ‘His head is no longer anything but an emblem. His heart is a cypher. He is a mere token. But we love him, don’t we?’”

The “authoritative voice” cruelly informing Titus that “his brain is on the turn” echoes the doctors diagnosing Peake and prescribing the treatments he begged to be spared. The deceitful voices who “love him” may express Peake’s fury at his wife and family for keeping him institutionalized. As Cathy Galvin summarizes in her profile of Peake’s son, Sebastian recalled him “demanding and forgetting, shouting and lashing out” when his disease first set in, and subsequently writing from hospital: “Maeve, more than ever before I want you now. […] I have almost lost my identity.” Titus Alone is greatly diminished alongside the genius of its predecessors, but in the play in the Black House, the failed novel has its own eerie charge: the failure of agency of Peake’s own condition combined with the eeriness of his work. When one knows the agony of Peake’s institutionalized final years, such lines carry a heartbreaking pathos.

To appreciate and apprehend Titus Alone honestly, I thus suggest that we need to hold two complex positions simultaneously. First, the third entry is certainly the least impressive of the Titus novels. Those who find it a shadow of the novel Peake might have written—if unaffected by dementia, by The Wit to Woo’s commercial failure, and by tortuous, ineffective shock therapy—are most likely correct. We can see this in both Sahlas’s clinical observations and in the haunting play in the Black House, where Peake has Titus wheel on a mocking crowd and cry “[W]hat’s wrong with my brain?”—only to be told, horrifically, that it is “on the turn.”

But second, and perhaps moreover, not all of Titus Alone’s reputation for failure comes from its author’s neurological condition. Some of it derives, simply, from the fact that Mervyn Peake wished to write a different book from the one that fans of the soon-to-be-established genre of Tolkienian fantasy might wish to read. The science-fictional elements were always going to be there—and many of them aren’t even very science-fictional. They are, in fact, the thing that revanchist medievalism hates the most: modern. Here I agree with Moorcock, who asserts that “Titus Alone was Peake’s attempt to take his character and method out of the hermetic world he had created in Gormenghast and Titus Groan and make it confront not only issues of identity, time and human interaction but the problems of modernity.” Peake’s direct encounters with those problems during the writing of Titus Alone were horrific: the camps in Belsen and his own painful institutionalization as his abilities tragically diminished. These terrifying failures of modernity are addressed—perhaps unsuccessfully but certainly head-on—in Titus Alone. Peake, through Titus’s cry for lost kingdoms of the mind, shows starkly what abject misery it is to beg in vain to have lost agency restored.

With tragic irony, it is in Titus Alone, the “failed” book, that Peake’s oeuvre locates its own eerie failure, and thus perhaps something of its lasting appeal. Winnington rightly states that “there can never be a ‘definitive text’ of Titus Alone.” By ending his “trilogy” with a book that will always frustrate, that will never cohere into a heroic or tragic resolution or a neatly delineated ambiguity, Peake paradoxically created a suitably haunting nonconclusion to his series. This tragic fading-out of the Titus books aligns with the alluring eeriness of Peake’s world, and sustains the trilogy’s mystique as the shadowy subconscious of a fantastic tradition that too often wraps up its strangest forays with the “consolations”—or “eucatastrophe,” as Tolkien wrote—of heroism.