#prunesquallor

[alice-makes-things]

Popped to the British library today to their fantasy exhibition and saw this fantastic original Mervyn Peake illustration of the silliest siblings who ever siblinged. They hold a special place in my heart so I was very excited.

Anyway the exhibition was incredibly cool. If you’re a big nerd like me go and see it - it’s on until the end of the month!

[ariellamermaid]

“In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.” ― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

[focsle]

‘Ask me to name the third lateral bloodvessel from the extremity of my index finger that runs east to west when I lie on my face at sundown, or the percentage of chalk to be found in the knuckles of an average spinster in her fifty-seventh year, ha, ha, ha! — or even ask me, my dear boy, to give details about the pulse rate of frogs two minutes before they die of scabies — these things are no tax upon my memory, ha, ha, ha!’

[mizerakle]

Doctor Prunesquallor from Gormenghast series by Mervyn Peake.

[invisiblearm]

Mervyn Peake characters, how I see them in my head: Dr. Prunesquallor 

[leafoscillot]

But I don't want anyone at my service. I'd rather have somebody 'in' my service perhaps. But not at it. Oh, no. I wouldn't have any service left if every young gentleman who arrived through my door was suddenly at it.

~Dr. Alfred Prunesquallor, Titus Groan.

[gormenghasts]

Doctor Prunesquallor, with his hyena laugh, his bizarre and elegant body, his celluloid face. His main defects? The insufferable pitch of his voice; his maddening laughter and his affected gestures. His cardinal virtue? An undamaged brain.