author
Hedley Peek
1858–1904
A Victorian writer with an unusually wide range, he moved between fantasy, speculative fiction, poetry, and sport writing while also playing a visible role in the famous Peek Freans biscuit business. His work has a curious fin-de-siècle energy, mixing imagination, ideas, and late-19th-century literary style.
1 Audiobook
The Chariot of the Flesh
by Hedley Peek
About the author
Born in Liverpool in 1858, Hedley Peek—more fully Francis Hedley Peek—was a British author, publisher, and businessman. Reliable reference sources describe him as a biscuit manufacturer as well as a sportswriter and author, and note that he was connected with the Peek Freans company, becoming its first chairman in 1901.
His writing ranged across several forms. Science-fiction reference sources credit him with works including Nema and Other Stories (1895) and The Chariot of the Flesh (1897), the latter remembered for its speculative ideas and unusual powers given to its central figure. He also worked on sporting literature, showing how easily he moved between imaginative fiction and more practical, public-facing writing.
Peek died in London on June 1, 1904. Though he is not widely known today, he remains an interesting late-Victorian figure: a commercial man of the world who also wrote fiction with ambitious, imaginative themes.