Titus Groan
core novel 1946 Gormenghast
Record
| First published | 1946 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.92 (24,777 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| Page count | 396 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780749300517 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
Titus Groan is a Gothic novel set within the sprawling, ritual-bound castle of Gormenghast, where the birth of an heir, the infant Titus, sets in motion a year of upheaval within a household governed by centuries of rigid, largely forgotten tradition. As the castle's inhabitants, including the proud Countess Gertrude, the anxious Lord Sepulchrave, and his elder daughter Fuchsia, go about their ceremonial lives, an ambitious and calculating kitchen boy named Steerpike escapes the drudgery of the castle's kitchens and begins quietly ingratiating himself with its key figures. His rise through Gormenghast's rigid hierarchy, achieved through manipulation and patient scheming, threatens to unsettle a world whose stability depends entirely on nobody ever questioning its ancient rituals.
Where it sits
- Universe: Gormenghast
- Series: The Gormenghast Novels core; position 1 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Mervyn Peake
Notes
- From the series record (The Gormenghast Novels): The three novels wholly written by Mervyn Peake (1946-1959), following Titus Groan, 77th Earl of Gormenghast, from birth in the vast ritual-bound castle to his flight from it. Canonical text of Titus Alone is the 1970 restoration edited by Langdon Jones from Peake's own manuscript: the 1959 first edition was heavily and clumsily cut in-house (whole chapters omitted, Peake's deliberate references to modern technology removed) while Peake was already incapacitated by the illness that killed him in 1968, the restoration recovers Peake's own text rather than adding other hands, per the established author-text fidelity rule.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Gormenghast Novels: position 1 of 3: next Gormenghast (1950)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gormenghast_(series)
- https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/peake_mervyn
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Groan
← Gormenghast dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.