Introduction Mervyn Peake is one of the great nonsense poets of the twentieth century. His ‘rhymes without reason’, as he called them, draw inspiration from the great Victorian nonsense poets Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, but are distinguished by the unique imagination of the man who invented Gormenghast castle, and whose illustrations of Carroll’s Alice books transformed the inhabitants of Wonderland into honorary subjects of the ancient House of Groan. This volume collects all Peake’s nonsense verse for the very first time, and so makes it possible to measure his contribution to the field against the achievements of his two most celebrated predecessors. A rapid glance through its pages will show that he stands up to this daunting comparison remarkably well. And it will show, too, that there is much more of his nonsense verse than anyone could have anticipated. As well as gathering all Peake’s published writings in this mode or genre, we found a great deal of material in the newly assembled Peake archive acquired by the British Library in the spring of 2010. Besides the two notebooks of ‘serious’ poetry mentioned in the introduction to Peake’s Collected Poems, dating from c. 1939 and c. 1946 respectively, we found two more exercise books with the titles ‘Nonsence Verse’ and ‘Nonsence / Songs of Nonsense’ inscribed on their covers. Both were formerly held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, under the shelf marks Bod. Dep. Peake 5 and Bod. Dep. Peake 4, and both are stuffed with a treasure trove of bizarre ballads, lunatic lyrics and ridiculous rhymes. The first of these books – identified as ‘Nonsence 1’ in the notes to this edition – contains drafts of Peake’s celebrated ballad The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, which according to Maeve Gilmore he completed ‘almost in one burst of writing, day and night’ on the island of Sark in about 1947 (A World Away, p. 141). This sanctions our tentatively dating Nonsence 1 to that year. The second book (Nonsence 2 in our notes) was evidently being used by Peake towards the end of his working life. The shaky hand in which it is written betrays the 1