Peake's Progress

In June 2011, British Library Publishing will be bringing out a new edition of Peake's Progress. The book, which first appeared in the 1970's, was edited by my late mother, Maeve Gilmore.

The publisher has chosen for the front cover, an evocative drawing taken from the 1940 Chatto & Windus edition of Ride a Cock Horse, a collection of nursery rhymes illustrated by my father. An elderly sage sits atop a rock stack, the formation of which is likely to have been inspired by similar granite shapes to be found around the coast of Sark where my father lived between 1933-1935. In the distance, behind the central figure, rugged mountains can be seen, reminders of the horizon my father would have been familiar with as he grew up in China.