Читать книгу The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843 - Doyle Richard - Страница 12

Introduction

Richard Doyle is best known today for his relationship to his more famous nephew, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and for his work as the illustrator who designed the famous cover of Punch magazine. He is also remembered for his illustrations of fairy tales and children’s stories, and for his folio edition, In Fairyland (1869), a masterpiece of the book arts. In 1843, at the age of nineteen, he became one of the principal graphic artists for Punch, devising hundreds of ornamental initials, border designs, caricatures, and political cartoons over the course of his seven-year career. After resigning from Punch, Doyle set out on a long career as a book illustrator, creating designs for popular works by authors such as Dickens and Thackeray, and publishing his own series of cartoon sketches in the comic adventure The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson (1854). Toward the end of his life he abandoned the medium of illustration for watercolor, sending his work to the Grosvenor Gallery and the Royal Exhibition. When he died in 1883 at the age of fifty-nine, his fairy painting and watercolors had already fallen out of fashion. A retrospective of his work at the Grosvenor Gallery, followed a year later by his estate sale, generated only modest interest.¹

The decline in Doyle’s reputation after his death was made worse by a number of biographical and material circumstances. He was trained at home by his father, the political cartoonist and satirist John Doyle (“HB”), and never attended the Royal Academy Schools. Nor was he apprenticed to a professional working painter or studio. Although he loved the RA exhibitions, at least as a young man, and although one of his great ambitions was to be made an academician, he did not display his first painting there until 1868, by which time he was forty-four years old.² Near the end of his career in the late 1870s his pictures at last began to appear regularly in the galleries, but because they were executed in the less durable medium of watercolor they proved hard to sell. Many of his ingenious earlier sketches and family productions never made it to the public eye, remaining for years in private hands and eventually descending to the special collections of libraries and museums.

Doyle’s reputation in the twentieth century was handicapped by his commitment to illustration, not only because of the common prejudice that holds illustrators are not truly artists—that is, active makers and interpreters rather than amanuenses of meaning—but also because of their perceived status as secondary. The author’s text was always considered paramount; the illustrator merely decorated or was charged with the task of simplifying the verbal text to ensure comprehension and mass appeal. As an illustrator of children’s and fairy tales and as a painter of fairy scenes, moreover, Doyle was further disadvantaged. If read at all, these works were considered appropriate only for children, fanciful and innocent, at most harmless fun. By the early 1900s the consensus view was summed up by Anthony R. Montalba, who in his introduction to Doyle’s work repeatedly calls his creations “charming” and defuses the word “satirist” with “gentle”: “He never approached bitterness or indelicacy, and his humourous work is a standing refutation of the preposterous notion that humour cannot exist apart from coarseness.”³ Similarly, The Dictionary of National Biography quietly damned him as “the kindliest of pictorial satirists” and “the most sportive and frolicsome of designers.”⁴ The American illustrator Joseph Pennell put it more bluntly, calling the majority of his designs “simply rubbish.”⁵ Small wonder then that Doyle’s first biographer, Lewis Lusk, never found a publisher for his book, though he worked on it for nearly ten years.⁶ In the first half of the twentieth century Doyle seemed destined to remain a genteel lightweight whose artwork was considered clever and amusing but ultimately superficial.

In 1983 the tide turned briefly with the centenary exhibition of Doyle family artwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum together with the publication of the first full-length biography by Rodney Engen.⁷ While providing a wealth of information about the Doyle family and plenty of new material, these two events did little to alter critical opinion or attract popular interest. Few scholarly articles appeared as a result, and only one fresh edition of Doyle’s work was published in the succeeding years.⁸ In spite of Engen’s biography, which went a long way toward providing a more comprehensive overview of his achievement, the standard notion persisted that Doyle was witty and whimsical, a graceful “limner” of fairyland, but a gifted amateur nonetheless. Today most critics believe that he never sustained the brilliance of his seven years at Punch and never, like his more famous colleagues John Leech and John Tenniel, went on to leave a lasting mark on the field of book illustration.⁹

While his early commitment to magazine publication and book illustration may have injured Doyle’s long-term reputation, it made him very popular in his day. His lively vignettes and initials, along with the elaborate designs for title pages, prefaces, and indices of the Punch biannual volumes, were deftly executed and warmly comic, attracting the attention of Walter Crane, whose early illustrations show a strong influence by Doyle’s work; Edwin Landseer, who encouraged his art students to copy from him; and William Heath Robinson, who was inspired by the cover of Punch. By the late 1840s, members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were studying Doyle’s composition of figures in his series on the Manners and Customs of Ye Englyshe and admiring its iconographic echoes of medieval tapestry. William Holman Hunt and Dante Rossetti were both impressed by Doyle’s powers of observation and attention to details of fashion and physiognomy. And it was precisely this work—Doyle’s witty parodies of polite society—that drew Thackeray and Dickens to him. Both men would commission illustrations for their novels and stories and also become close friends.¹⁰

One of the primary claims of the present edition is that Doyle was already a talented and prolific artist before his tenure with Punch, and that the works of his early period have been neglected because of the unorthodox means of their production, their select audience, and their relative scarcity. In an astonishing surge of creativity between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, the young “Dicky Doyle” executed a series of brilliant private and semi-public works. These consisted of unique and often illuminated manuscripts, some published in small editions subscribed by family and friends, others reproduced posthumously in facsimile editions. Between 1840 and 1843, Doyle produced at least ten works of varied genres: The Tournament (1840), Fores National Envelopes (1840), Dick Doyle’s Journal (1840), Comic Histories (1841), Dick Kitcat’s Book of Nonsense (1842), Jack the Giant Killer (1842), Beauty and the Beast (1842), A Grand Historical, Allegorical, Classical and Comical Procession of Remarkable Personages Ancient, Modern and Unknown (1842), The Christening Procession of Prince Taffy (1842), and The Brother to the Moon’s Visit to the Court of Queen Vic (1843) (see figs. 1–4).¹¹ These projects are remarkable for their skillful handling of satire, their beautiful coloring and level of finish, and their maturity. The last three works in particular explore Doyle’s favorite theme of the procession, multiplying characters, facial expressions, and costume with seemingly inexhaustible invention. The books become metaphors for the creative process itself, as Doyle coins figure after figure marching across the pages in a ceaseless and wondrous parade of human and animal variability.

Figure 1. Richard Doyle, The Tournament, or The Days of Chivalry Revived (London: J. Dickinson, 1840), p. 2. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. RB 339673.)

Figure 2. Richard Doyle, The Christening Procession of Prince Taffy (London: Fores, 1842), p. 1. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. RB 114221.)

Figure 3. Richard Doyle, “Celestial Guards,” from The Brother to the Moon’s Visit to the Court of Queen Vic (London: Fores, 1842). (HEW 5.3.1, Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

Figure 4. Richard Doyle, handwritten page with illustration from Illustrated Manuscript of the Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, ca. 1840. (MS Eng 843, Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

The culmination of this fertile period is the set of illustrated letters that Doyle produced for his father in 1842–43, heretofore almost completely unknown. I submit that the letters represent Doyle’s apprentice work for Punch, a portfolio of verbal-visual improvisations that not only landed him a coveted position but later served as a source of inspiration during his first few years at the magazine. They are hybrid works that combine calligraphy with finely drawn and occasionally watercolored visual images and represent an ingenious and original achievement. The manuscripts form an epistolary canvas for Doyle’s experimentation with different modes—caricature, comedy, satire, self-portraiture, journalism, documentary realism—which, as the correspondence proceeds, he places in tension with more surreal and grotesque improvisations. The interaction of verbal and visual design is sophisticated, particularly toward the end of the sequence where the images begin to explore sensitive psychological areas that the more socially conscious text glosses over or conceals. The rich testimony vouchsafed by these letters allows us glimpses of the turmoil that tears at the Doyle family during this time, revealing his response to family tragedy and his relationships with his father, his siblings, and various public figures of authority. In a larger sense, the letters also provide valuable evidence of Doyle’s anxieties about national and religious identity and his ambivalence over the London “multitude.” The evidence presented in these manuscript-canvases soundly refutes the conventional view of Doyle as a figure who lived always on the surface. At times a darker and more complex portrait emerges here, one that is infinitely more compelling than that of the charming but predictable illustrator of children’s stories and fairy tales we have come to accept.

The fifty-three illustrated letters of 1842–43 here reproduced, transcribed, and annotated have been published hitherto only in brief extracts. Their absence from Doyle’s corpus has constituted a significant gap in our knowledge of his early years. The letters extend the development of his fine early albums and signify the fruition of an aesthetic style he had been gradually moving toward since his earliest years. In this regard, the steady “Punchification” of his work afterward, from 1843 to 1850, transformed Doyle’s private, more or less spontaneous manuscript inventions into mass-produced magazine fare for public consumption. This is not to say the visual style he adopted at Punch lacks wit or imagination—far from it. Time and again he delivered marvelous visual material under strict deadline and succeeded in captivating a mass audience.¹² Rather, the new assignment meant that he began regularizing and repeating his own style to meet the demands of editors, weekly publication, and limitations of space. By the late 1840s his muse was increasingly harnessed by having to prepare designs for the front and back matter of the magazine as well as supplemental work for the annual Pocketbook. Together with series like Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe, which became increasingly repetitive and claustrophobic, these assignments hampered him from developing his style in other directions and in the broader arena of the political cartoon.

THE COMPOSITION OF THE LETTERS

In July 1842 John Doyle set his sons the task of writing him a three-page weekly letter that described their experiences in London.¹³ Although no instructions or specific guidelines for the assignment are extant, we may gather from the contents of the fifty-three letters by Richard, along with the far fewer surviving manuscripts by his brothers James, Henry, and Charles, that it required them to focus primarily on their cultural experiences and to offer critical commentary on operas, plays, concerts, books, poems, magazines, picture exhibitions, and public events.¹⁴ They were also encouraged to recount anecdotes they remembered from their reading or tutorial sessions. Part of the assignment was to supplement their writing with visual sketches drawn from memory. Whether a specific painting, outdoor concert, or military review they had seen, John Doyle charged them with recording the experience visually as well as in writing. Unlike his brothers, Richard devoted more of his time to ordinary events, balancing his aesthetic views with vivid narratives and sketches of day-to-day life in the metropolis.

The deadline for the weekly epistles was set at seven o’clock each Sunday morning, probably because the family needed to be at chapel by eight and had other obligations later in the day.¹⁵ Attempting to elicit a modicum of pity from his father, Richard laments this cruel hour in the mock-pathetic tone of his letter of February 15, 1843: “How horrible is the situation of your son. Only ponder for a few moments upon the awful situation of a human creature, who no matter how late he went to bed the night before, is doomed to tear himself from his resting place, his repose, his warm and comfortable couch, (is’int it affecting?) his night cap, his home,—is compelled I say, to rise from his bed” (no. 21). This unfortunate condition is likely the reason John Doyle urged his sons to begin their letters earlier in the week, though it was common to find them all hard at work on Saturday evenings. Happily, there was an incentive (and consolation) for their labors. As Richard reports, John Doyle paid them each five shillings a month for their work. If they missed an assignment, however, they were docked sixpence (no. 21). At least in Richard’s case, there seems to have been a great deal of psychological maneuvering to cajole extensions for late work.

With the exception of two brief periods, which I discuss in the preface, the family all lived together at 17 Cambridge Terrace, Hyde Park. This makes the form of the letter itself, at least at first, oddly superfluous and somewhat puzzling. Why bother writing out the address of a “letter” directed to a family member living under the same roof? For that matter, since the recipient never wrote back, why even use the format of a letter, rather than, say, a notebook, sketchbook, or journal entry? Most enigmatically, why take the trouble of folding the artwork into a neat square package, thus creasing the carefully wrought designs? As far as I can tell from the address sheets and evidence in the letters themselves, there were three methods of delivery: by hand, post, or private courier. In his first letter, dated (or possibly misdated) July 14, 1840, Henry wrote the following in the address space: “For / John Doyle Esq^r / at his house in Cambridge Terrace / written this day and / dilivered with his own / hand / Henry.”¹⁶ Moreover, Henry omitted the family address from nineteen of his twenty-five letters, inscribing only his father’s name. The majority of Richard’s letters are addressed similarly or to his father, followed by some version of the number, street, and district. In letters toward the end of the series he became less interested in filling out the full address. In fact, the final six letters note his father’s name followed by a scrawl of etceteras. Four letters lack any form of address at all.¹⁷ These specific ones, then, appear to have been delivered by hand, though this conclusion must remain conjectural, particularly given that the leaves were folded.

What we do know is that Richard inscribed eleven of his letters “paid” or “prepaid,” suggesting that they must have been conveyed through the post. Support for this notion can be found in both the letters of Richard and Henry, where they describe having to awake before seven o’clock and walk to Hyde Park. Although they never state it directly, I can only surmise that they were headed for a postbox or courier office. Why else venture out so early on a Sunday morning? Of course, this still begs the question of why they needed to mail the letters to their own address. Was it John Doyle’s way of authenticating the assignment, emphasizing its seriousness, fulfilling the terms of the original contract? If so, and given the draconian deadline, one finds it hard not to sympathize with Richard’s protests.

Like most private correspondence of this period, these letters were circulated among other family members as well. The brothers shared their letters among themselves and probably with their two sisters before passing them along to their father. As a result, they naturally felt the stirrings of competition and sibling rivalry.¹⁸ In his weekly epistle of March 25, 1843, for example, Henry Doyle writes: “As I promised to give you an account of last Saturdays adventure I will keep my promise although greatly discouraged by James’s and Dick’s excellent letters on the same subject.” Did their father, unconsciously or not, encourage his sons to see their letter-writing as a contest? Did he model the assignment on the art exhibitions and cartoon competitions that were the very life’s blood of the London art world during this time? Since his sons often visited the same events together, the spur to originality or, conversely, paralysis, must have been even greater. In the same letter, Henry admits that he will not “attempt” a sketch of a scene on the Hungerford pier because Dick has already “so graphically described” it. Noticing “a great fat man” who falls asleep at the opera in an earlier letter, Henry wishes “Dick had been there to see him that he might make a sketch of him, for I am sure that nothing short of Dick in his funniest humour could have done Justice to him.” And on May 2, 1843, he mentions James’s remarks on the Royal Academy Exhibition, conceding that they are “very just and express my opinion exactly.” The work of his talented older brothers clearly hampered the full expression of Henry’s own artistic sensibility, though to the ordinary viewer many of the sketches in his letters appear just as accomplished as Richard’s and James’s (see fig. 5). Perhaps Charles, the youngest brother, wrote so few of his own letters because, as the last child of a large and talented family, he felt the burden of performance the most acutely.

Figure 5. Henry Doyle, ALS, March 12, 1842, p. 1. (The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MA 3315. Purchased on the Fellows Fund with special assistance of Mr. and Mrs. Walter H. Page, 1974. Photographic credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.)

If unaffected, at least on the surface, by the skill of his brothers’ letters, Richard was nonetheless sensitive to the time pressures of the weekly assignment. Like Henry, who judges one of his sketches a “wretched failure” and another “an infamous lible [sic],” Richard was keenly aware of his father’s high expectations. In his postscript to a letter of September 24, 1843, Richard also admits inadequacy: “Will you be so good as to look upon this letter as a failure?” (no. 47) But the complaint that recurs most often is his lack of a subject. On February 12, 1843, he states: “It sometimes unfortunately happens that I am quite at a loss for a subject whereof to write about” (no. 20); on April 16, “I am without anything to say” (no. 29); on September [3 or 17], 1843: “I really do not know what to write about” (no. 46), and so on. He grumbles over having to fill three sheets of paper and frequently responds by sketching rather than writing. “I am very happy to see that I am half way down my second page,” he announces, “although as yet I have not been able to think of any good subject to write about. Don’t imagine that I have got any interesting or marvellous anecdote to tell you, because you see the above strange assemblage of hobgoblins, for it really does not illustrate any known circumstance either in history or fiction, but was just invented by me for the sake of occupying so much space and thereby having less paper to cover in the writing” (no. 46).

Toward the end of the series of letters, in fact, the visual improvisations not only relieve the labor of handwriting but begin to take precedence. More and more space is allotted to the pen-and-ink designs, which become increasingly elaborate and fanciful, textured with cross-hatching and chiaroscuro. The letter of October 15, 1843, for example, offers a complex visual reenactment of one of his dreams (no. 49); that of November 19, 1843, uses its seven brief words to introduce a bustling three-page carnival of hybrid figures (no. 52; see plates 7–9 in the gallery); and the very last page of the final letter depicts an allegorical self-portrait that is carefully glossed in the text. In these late letters, the London of parks, theaters, galleries, and concert rooms gives way to the teeming metropolis of Doyle’s own mind. Far from inhibiting his artistic faculties, by the final months the pressure of the weekly assignment has generated the most fully realized and dazzling of his visual creations.

The question remains about the ultimate purpose of John Doyle’s unusual assignment to his sons. In the end, why did he commission these weekly productions, which in Richard’s case gradually began to assume the form of graphic compositions rather than conventional letters? In the absence of any hard evidence we can only offer conjectures here. At the most basic level, Doyle may have wanted to keep an eye on his sons as he himself pursued his own career as a political cartoonist and was frequently away from home. London was a city rife with opportunities for trouble, offering an even greater temptation to boys who were schooled at home by tutors. Thus the letters may have served as a kind of disciplinary exercise, a weekly report of his sons’ activities while he was at work. He may also have wanted to keep them preoccupied in the absence of their mother as well as affording their elder sister Annette a respite from minding the children and an opportunity to attend to other household responsibilities.

But all of these reasons are unsatisfying given the actual content and form of the letters themselves. It is far more plausible that Doyle envisioned the assignment as a means of preparation and training for his sons’ professional careers, either as art critics, portrait painters, graphic artists for the exciting new illustrated magazines, or social and political commentators. The letters of James and Henry are full of reflections on pictures, plays, and concerts, and many of Richard’s letters mimic the style and format of the standard exhibition review found in the newspapers and magazines of the day. Lending further credence to this idea is that Doyle remunerated his sons and required that the letters be posted, thus certifying them with a kind of professional seal. He wanted to give the assignment rigor by enforcing a deadline and encouraging his sons to see the task as a journalistic assignment, a real job. In this regard it cannot be an accident that Richard’s position as a graphic illustrator at Punch dovetails beautifully with his increasingly elaborate work in the letters; that in effect, the one assignment leads directly and organically into the other. Taken as a whole, Richard’s collection of letters to his father must have served as an impressive portfolio, a vivid testimony of his skill as a draughtsman, and thus played a key role in earning him the coveted position.¹⁹

BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT

John Doyle, Richard’s father, was the son of a tailor. He was born in Dublin in 1797, three years before the Act of Union with Britain, which led to years of social and economic upheaval in Ireland. He attended the Dublin Society’s Drawing Academy and studied with the landscape painter Gaspare Gabrielli and the miniaturist John Comerford. On February 13, 1820, he married Marianne Conan, and the couple had their first child, Annette, in January 1821. Because of the lack of opportunities for a young artist in economically depressed Dublin, the Doyles moved to London at about this time. The early years in the city were difficult as Doyle tried to cultivate patrons and find his footing as an animal and miniature painter. In 1825 he gained some success in conventional oils by exhibiting his first painting at the Royal Academy, Turning Out the Stag, which was followed each of the next two years by portraits of gentlemen.

It was the new art of lithography, however, that eventually ignited his career. In the late 1820s he began creating lithographic portraits of prominent men like the Dukes of Wellington and York, which were then printed, and sold in large numbers. He visited the House of Commons, where he quietly watched the proceedings and then later drew caricatures of statesmen and politicians from memory. Soon he began publishing sketches, the forerunners of today’s political cartoons, under the pseudonym “HB.” In a more tempered and classical style than predecessors James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson or fellow cartoonists like George Cruikshank, Doyle satirized political figures gently and gained a wide following. From 1827 to 1850 he produced 917 of these sketches, carefully guarding his identity and maintaining his anonymity until his retirement.²⁰

In the meantime the Doyle family grew. The Doyles’ first child, Ann Martha (Annette), was followed by James (1822), Richard (1824), Henry (1827), Francis (c. 1829), Adelaide (1831), and Charles (1832). The family moved house several times in the early years in London. By 1833, however, and as a result of John Doyle’s success, they had settled in a fashionable new neighborhood near Hyde Park at 17 Cambridge Terrace, now Sussex Gardens. Most of the children would spend their adult lives there. It was not until 1864 that Richard moved again—with his father and several siblings to 54 Clifton Gardens, Maida Hill—and another ten years before he finally established his own residence, which he shared with his sister Annette. The youngest son, Charles Altamont Doyle, was the only one of the Doyle children to move away for good (to Edinburgh in 1849), and the only one to produce offspring of his own, prodigiously, as it turned out. He and his wife, Mary, had nine children, the second of whom was Arthur Conan Doyle. The brothers James and Henry married late in life and were childless, Richard remained a bachelor until his death, and both his older sister Annette and his aunt Anne took their vows as nuns.

The five years that bookend Richard Doyle’s letters to his father, between 1839 and 1844, were a tumultuous time for the family. Earlier studies have not placed enough emphasis on the events of this period because of uncertainties surrounding key dates. Recent investigations, however, have uncovered enough reliable information to help us clarify the exact sequence of events during this time.²¹ Until very recently, biographers of the Doyle family believed that John’s wife, Marianne, died in 1832, shortly after giving birth to their last child, Charles.²² The recent discovery of her death certificate reveals that in fact she lived for another seven years, dying of a “Diseased Heart” at the age of forty-four on December 11, 1839. At about this time, Marianne’s brother, Michael Conan, who was a barrister and a freelance literary, music, and drama critic, moved in temporarily to help the Doyle family. He brought with him his two sisters, Anne and Elizabeth.²³

A few years later, Richard’s younger brother Francis (“Frank”) also passed away, though the exact date and cause of his death have long been a matter of debate. At one point in his biography, Rodney Engen states that he “died about 1840” (13), only to claim later that “about 1843 Francis . . . became ill and died” (35). Georgina Doyle admits that the date of his death “is a mystery,” though like Phillip Bergem she leans toward early 1843. Although I have not been able to track down Francis’s death certificate, I did locate his burial record at the London Metropolitan Archives. It gives the date and place of his interment as June 15, 1843, in the South Metropolitan Cemetery, now known as Norwood Cemetery in Lambeth. This would put his death a few days earlier, between June 10 and 14, 1843. A Conan Doyle biographer has maintained that Francis died in a typhoid epidemic but offers no supporting evidence.²⁴ Neither is there any evidence for the claims of other scholars who speculate that he died of consumption, though his sister did succumb to this disease only ten months later. Adelaide (“Adele”) died on April 2, 1844, at the age of thirteen, and like her mother and older brother was buried in the South Metropolitan Cemetery.

The death of Richard’s mother, combined with the tragic early deaths of two younger siblings, offers a dramatically different and much more somber picture of this time than we have previously known. Within the relatively short span of four and a half years, the Doyle family was beset by a series of painful emotional crises. No sooner had they recovered from one traumatic loss, it must have seemed, than they were laid low by another. The effect was to draw the remaining members of the family closer together, and to tighten the bond between the siblings. Because the losses also focused more attention on their widowed father, these setbacks compelled the children to rally around him and bolster his spirits. This may partially explain the explosion of artistic activity during this time, the children’s almost manic desire to produce artwork that would lighten their father’s mood and, above all, provide comfort and succor.

In this sense, then, the Sunday shows, the pantomimes, the concerts—all the colorful performances of the early 1840s—represent the children’s attempt symbolically to replace their mother, to substitute for her loss a full and rich world of art. Given that she died and was buried at the height of the Christmas season, it is no accident that every Christmas thereafter Richard threw himself into frantic preparations for the holiday show. It is not from his father that he felt this pressure, as biographers have argued, but, I would contend, from the memory of his mother. As early as October, his output of weekly letters flagged as he anticipated starting on the annual project: “Christmas is drawing near!!! And work is beginning” (no. 14). As the years passed, this ritual grew ever more elaborate, coming to signify the children’s memorial, indeed their gift, to their mother and their testament to the family’s spirit of resilience.

The fact that Marianne died seven years later than has been thought radically alters our view of Richard’s journal of 1840, which he began almost immediately after her burial. Rather than a whimsical and light-hearted exercise, which “charts his spontaneous humour and boyhood love of adventure” (Engen, 17), it now looks more like an emergency response to a psychological crisis. The unrelenting nature of the humor, the journal’s consistently energetic and upbeat tone, stems less from “the threat of failure in his father’s eyes,” as Engen argues, than from a deep desire to divert their minds. Here is the first entry, of January 1, 1840, a comic masterpiece of muddle accompanied by strains of guilt and self-punishment:

The first of January. Got up late, very bad. Made good resolutions and did not keep them. Went out and got a cold. Did keep it. First thought I would, then thought I would not, was sure I would, was positive I would not, at last was determined I would, write a journal. Began it. This is it and I began it on the first of January, one thousand eight hundred and forty. Hope I may be skinned alive by wild cats if I don’t go on with it [sketch of a panicked Dick surrounded by leaping cats].²⁵

Of course the idea of composing a journal was also, like the weekly letters, John Doyle’s own way of finding an outlet to channel his son’s grief. The more Richard worked on his entries, the less time he spent brooding and despondent, though his father’s strategy is obviously the classic formula for repression. We know from a few surviving early works that Richard was already developing a talent for caricature, but his mother’s death may well have been the psychic catalyst for Richard’s lasting commitment to his comic muse. Coming barely three months after his fifteenth birthday, her loss goes part of the way toward explaining why humor and hyberbole not only became so attractive to him but were also so unremitting,²⁶ and why he so rarely dwelt in his writings on sorrow and misfortune. We know from the illustrations in his letters that he witnessed the urgent crises of the day like poverty, hunger, and mass unemployment, but he never mentioned them. Even the Chartist assemblies that he saw, with their potential for street riots and violence, became fodder for his humor. “Things are looking rather dangerous,” he reports to his father on August 21, 1842, and then produces a comic miniature of himself and a lion surprising each other (no. 6). Wit, irony, and comic exaggeration become his modes of survival in these letters, powerful defense mechanisms against the grim external realities of political unrest and the more intimate threats of disease and sudden death.

It is tempting to see Richard Doyle’s lifelong attachment to childhood and to the illustration of children’s stories and fairy tales as yet another response to personal tragedy, and as his way of perpetually remaining his father’s son, idealizing his early pursuits and transforming them into a productive career. That he never left home, spent nearly his entire adult life under the same roof as his father, and remained a perennial bachelor suggests an unresolved sense of guilt and a profound fear of betraying him. To marry and sire children would be tantamount to abandoning his family and setting up an alternate competing one. Annette and Richard felt the pull to remain their father’s children the most keenly, the brothers James and Henry less so, though they waited a long time to marry and, as mentioned before, never had children. It was only Charles, the youngest, who managed to elude these forces of regression, even though he had to travel as far away as Scotland in order to marry and have children. Still, he paid a high price for his departure, spending most of his adulthood in a battle with alcoholism. He was institutionalized in his final years, and died in an asylum at Dumfries.

If the death of Richard’s mother represents the calamity that shadows his 1840 journal, it is the death of his younger brother Francis that haunts the letters to his father.²⁷ On the surface, it appears that Frank’s decline and death go unrecorded in these texts. With the exception of one vague sentence in the letter of August 27, 1843, which could be construed as referring to any number of misfortunes, Richard makes no overt mention of Frank’s passing, nor does he refer in earlier letters to an existing precondition or the progress of a specific disease. Frank is mentioned for the last time on September 4, 1842, and, in a letter dated Christmas day of the same year, his name appears in a sketch that lists the seven Doyle children (no. 15). Henceforth he vanishes. As stated in the preface, John Doyle’s removal in late April 1843 to a cottage in Acton five miles from their Paddington residence provides a significant clue that all was not right. He remained in this rural retreat for more than a month and then returned to his London home. During this time he also ceased work on his own political sketches, none of which was published between April 20 and June 30, 1843. Before this period his cartoons had been appearing at regular weekly and biweekly intervals. In a three-week stretch from May 27 to June 25, 1843, Richard too stopped writing his weekly assignments, a hiatus that suggests a period of intense anxiety and then, after about June 10, mourning for his brother.

For the modern reader, of course, all this evidence is maddeningly indirect, and seems to point to an evasion of emotional responsibility. Where in the letters is the expression of anguish and despair, the protestations against the family’s cruel fate? Where the sympathy and condolence for his father? Most of all, given their strict adherence to Catholicism, where are Doyle’s invocations of God and his turn to the family’s faith for comfort and guidance? When we realize that the original aim of the letters was never confessional, therapeutic, or “personal” in our modern sense, Doyle’s extended silence seems more plausible, less hard-hearted. According to the rules of the assignment, the letters were not meant to indulge in feelings of grief, loss, or guilt. These would have been internalized and worked through privately in prayer or in confession with a priest. Instead, much like Doyle’s earlier journal, the letters were secular reports intended to focus his father’s attention elsewhere and to create aesthetic compensations for the absence of a brother and son.

This does not mean that Richard’s response to his brother’s death is completely missing from the letters. On the contrary, a lingering grief emerges partly through the visual designs and partly through his choice of more serious subjects in the succeeding months. He may never overtly reveal his emotions in writing, but he does hint at the distress and despair he experienced through his sketches. Two striking examples from this time are the letters of April 16 and May 21, 1843 (nos. 29 and 34), both of which coincide with Frank’s period of illness and his removal to Acton. The first begins innocently enough, as Doyle complains about the lack of a subject and then relates his trip to William Ross’s studio, discussing the artist’s cartoon-in-progress for the Westminster Hall competition. It is familiar territory for Doyle, a template that he has followed numerous times before. The final page, however, offers a stirring departure from the standard paradigm. It presents his father with one of his “day dreams,” a darkly comic vision of various tiny figures marching steadily up the margins toward a gigantic ogre at the top of the page. The creature waits, with its mouth wide open, to engorge them. Strangely, the groups of figures move willingly, some eagerly, toward the cavernous mouth, as if to a festive public event. They seem either oblivious of the danger that awaits them or resigned to it.

On closer inspection, the figures comprise an anthology of characters and objects Doyle has sketched in his previous letters—among them, soldiers, cavalry officers, royal carriages, stagecoaches and a steam engine, gentlemen and ladies from the streets of London, domestic animals, Oriental exotics, and a fairy-tale giant shouldering his club. Above the text panel sits a little fat man in a waistcoat and top hat who exhorts the multitudes (and us) to step right up, “come one, come all” to the show, as if he were a circus barker. Is that a coffin beneath him? Does the motley band play trumpets? If we direct our gaze lower, toward the bottom of the page, we might notice something even more peculiar about the source of the crowd itself. The figures appear to be originating or evacuating from a dark hole below the ogre, which suggests an anus. The circulation of the figures from excrement to aliment only magnifies the dreariness of the overall vision. Doyle has transformed the great London spectacle and his favored idiom of the fairy tale into a grotesque loop of feeding and voiding worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. As creations from his own imaginative workforce rise obediently toward the giant maw, it is hard not to see a portrait of Doyle’s own capitulation and helplessness—and a statement about the waste of his art (literally) in forestalling his brother’s illness.

The startling watercolor that flows down the first page of the letter of May 21, 1843, is similarly apocalyptic, though even darker and more surreal (no. 34; see plate 4 in the gallery). Washed in lurid hues of blue, brown, and green, it depicts a floating assembly of figures as they plunge in freefall down the right side of the page. Like the earlier letter it represents an assortment of human and animal types, adding performers from the London shows, ballerinas, and horse-riders. This time, however, Doyle inverts their movement and they all plummet downward, many headfirst and spread-eagled. As if imported from a John Martin landscape, a flurry of female spirits in white flowing gowns enters at the far left, offering some hope until we realize that their bodies are limp and resigned and that they are being pursued by a darker band of figures that wave their arms menacingly. Meanwhile, at the bottom left, Doyle has sketched his version of the evolutionary scale, an insect leading up through a human figure crawling on all fours. Where we anticipate an erect hominid as the pinnacle of this sequence, Doyle gives us two birds struggling to take flight.

The scene could not be more different than the refined portraits of academician Frank Grant that Doyle discusses on the very next page of the letter. Things are not only out of control but out of order: the dancers are shown toppling rather than balancing; the angels are fleeing their own demons rather than comforting those who fall; the evolutionary scale abruptly reverses itself; and all the figures, whether archangels, stage performers, servants, or nobility are jumbled together and falling helplessly into the abyss. There are obviously comic elements—the egg man, the falling top hat and riding crop—but how un-Victorian the scene is! Naked figures, farmyard animals, and ladies in crinoline dresses, their legs wide apart, all tumble headlong in a nightmare landscape. Such a grimly comic vision of chaos, the social order turned topsy-turvy, must surely have sprung from the emotional distress and feelings of helplessness caused by Frank’s illness. The older brother can do nothing for the younger, who grows ever weaker, quarantined in a distant cottage, and his imagination responds by destroying its own creations.²⁸ A week later he gives us what seems to be the only direct image of his grief, a full-page self-portrait, much different in tone from his other comic versions, in which he represents himself wide-eyed and stricken (no. 35).

After Frank’s death, Doyle’s letters return to their earlier, more realistic style, as he sketches copies of artwork from the exhibitions, scenes from London life, and vignettes of excursions taken with his brothers. But the memory of Frank persists. On June 25, 1843, he resumed the weekly letters to his father, ostensibly taking up where he left off with a discussion of the pictures at the Royal Academy exhibition (no. 36). On the first page he makes a detailed sketch of Paul Falconer Poole’s Solomon Eagle Exhorting the People to Repentance, during the Plague of the Year 1665, and then proceeds to relate its merits (see fig. 6 for Poole’s original). Although his technical appreciation tells us little, his pen-and-ink sketch of the picture offers a visual reminder of the family’s recent loss as well as a perceptive analysis of his father’s mental state.

Figure 6. Paul Falconer Poole, Solomon Eagle Exhorting the People to Repentance, during the Plague of the Year 1665, 1843. Oil on canvas. (Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, UK / Photo © Sheffield / The Bridgeman Art Gallery.)

Based on a passage from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, the painting shows a crowded courtyard in a poor district of London where several groups of the sick, dying, and despondent languish. Some figures grieve and some read the Bible. Others play cards or drink, ignoring the scenes of despair around them. In the middle of the composition stands Solomon Eagle wearing only a loincloth with a pan of burning coals on his head. His eyes blaze fanatically as he denounces the scattered crowd, himself unaffected by the plague. Holding a Bible in his left hand and pointing skyward with his right, he cries out that the plague is God’s judgment upon the people and they must repent their sins. In the left middle ground, as Doyle notes (and depicts), “a sick man just risen from his bed . . . emerges from a door with an expression of wildness and at the same time vacancy in his eyes that is terrible to look at, while a woman with a face of horror more terrible still, attempts to pull him back.” In three places Poole represents corpses, most prominently in the far left background, where he depicts a group of figures carrying a body on a raised pallet.

It can be no coincidence that of the hundreds of artworks on display at the Royal Exhibition of 1843, Doyle chose this particular image to copy in such detail for his father. Everywhere in the picture John Doyle would have seen tableaux of his own family’s recent ordeal. He could not have overlooked the body being borne slowly across the background, which would have summoned painful recollections of Frank’s burial just ten days before. Nor could he have missed the several portraits of fathers who respond to the epidemic in attitudes of paralysis or hysteria. In the text of his letter Doyle draws his father’s attention to the left side because that is where Poole has positioned a motherless family group, whose patriarch looks traumatized and broken, awaiting the end. Two of his daughters pore over Bibles and the third holds a dying or dead infant—all three looking elsewhere for guidance. Similarly, the man in the middle foreground sprawls on the flagstones with his son, gaping helplessly at the preacher. The man at the far right stares blankly at a dead or unconscious female slumped against her sister. And the rest of the men in the painting either slouch on benches or sleep. All are powerless to console their fellow victims in this time of calamity.

That many of these faces echo that of the protagonist, who is consumed by a religious mania, is no tribute to them. Shadowed by what looks like a symbol of the Black Death, Solomon Eagle comes to announce God’s punishment rather than his mercy. Doyle’s rendering, to be sure, flattens the fierce countenance of the original, but Solomon Eagle nevertheless stands here as a figure of dubious if not dangerous authority. Did Doyle, however unconsciously, intend this portrait of a fanatic as a warning to his own father? Did he see in him a temporary madness brought on by long isolation with his dying son and failure to save him?²⁹ Did he believe that as a result of the crisis his father had embraced his religion with a zeal that threatened his reason and sanity? And what of the mysterious feminine figure who stands behind Solomon Eagle? Veiled and swathed in black, she stands apart from the other characters, a spirit from another realm quietly watching the preacher. Would she have reminded John Doyle of his departed wife, Marianne, returned to witness her husband’s trials and perhaps judge him?³⁰

However we wish to see it, Doyle’s recreation of Poole’s painting demonstrates to his father that he has not forgotten or fully come to terms with the meaning of Frank’s death. Nor has he been blind to his father’s expressions of despair. In spite of the academic, seemingly impersonal nature of the exercise—the letter is not bordered in black—Doyle manages to examine, even if indirectly, his own and his father’s grief. (He will depict his own grief far more overtly two years later in an illustration for Dickens’s The Chimes; see fig. 7.) He reappropriates Solomon Eagle as a portrait of his own family that embodies his unspoken anxieties about their fragile condition and his fears that the healing process may take a radical turn. It is important to note here that Henry Doyle resumed his own letters on exactly the same date, June 25, 1843, and that he too copied a painting from the Royal Exhibition that subtly telegraphed his grief. The work that he chose, Richard Redgrave’s The Poor Teacher, is a far more conventional treatment of mourning, however, and a picture of consolation rather than horror. As Henry writes, “There is a beautiful expression of calm sadness upon her face which I never saw surpassed, and I never saw a tear so beautifully introduced as that little one which is slowly rolling down her cheek” (see fig. 8). Unlike his brother, who confronts a variety of desperate responses to the prospect of death in Solomon Eagle, Henry sentimentalizes his family’s sorrow, finding in Redgrave’s portrait a traditional expression of suffering and resignation.

Figure 7. Richard Doyle, illustration for “Third Quarter,” from Charles Dickens, The Chimes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1845). (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. RB 122301.)

Figure 8. Henry Doyle, ALS, Sunday, June 25, 1843, p. 4. (The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MA 3315. Purchased on the Fellows Fund with special assistance of Mr. and Mrs. Walter H. Page, 1974. Photographic credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.)

Further evidence of his father’s delicate emotional state arises in Richard’s subsequent letters of July through September 1843. As a result of Frank’s death and as a way to ensure their own survival, John Doyle prescribed the fashionable “cold water cure” for his remaining children. The new science of hydropathy had only recently begun to attract attention with the publication of influential books and public lectures by Drs. James Wilson and James Gully, who set up a famous water cure establishment at Malvern. Pure water was declared essential in maintaining health and preventing diseases. Hydropathists recommended drinking and bathing in pure water combined with vigorous exercises such as hill walking and running. They also advocated a simple diet, frequent breaks from mental activity, and the cultivation of habits of regularity and sobriety.

Early each morning, consequently, Doyle sent his children to “drink the waters” from St. Agnes’s Well in Kensington Gardens and “systematically run up and down hills” (no. 39). More than a month later, they were still following the regime “with a perseverance that does infinite credit to all the parties concerned,” as Richard reports, though he confesses that he has noticed no improvement in his constitution (no. 44). During the first cure, in fact, he says that he was “seized” with a head cold. Nevertheless, he uses the outings as an opportunity to observe a gallery of characters who will later serve his imagination, and gently mocks his father’s excessive care: “one morning last week when I was kept at home by tooth ache, I really felt quite uncomfortable all day, to think that I had not seen the respectable old woman who keeps the glasses, the foreigner who drinks seven or eight moderate sized tumblers full, taking a walk between every couple, the man who washed his face at the spring, . . . to think that I had not seen any of these interesting people for the space of forty eight hours—it was really quite shocking to think of, I declare” (no. 44).

A more serious indication of concern for his father’s capacity to restore the family’s health emerges in Richard’s near obsession with Father Theobald Mathew, the Irish “Apostle of Temperance” who was visiting London at this time and exhorting people to take the pledge of sobriety. Father Mathew was enjoying considerable success in his tour of England and Scotland, garnering widespread coverage in the newspapers, drawing massive crowds at his rallies and recruiting thousands to his cause. Thomas Carlyle had accidentally happened on him in Manchester and was struck by his broad build, strikingly handsome face, and charismatic voice; indeed, he was so deeply moved by his simple speech that he “almost cried to listen to him,” and when it was over tipped his hat. Several weeks later, his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, responded to Father Mathew with even greater enthusiasm, at one point during a London rally swinging herself up to the platform by a rope and landing “in a horizontal position at his feet.”³¹

Doyle was no less taken by him, though characteristically more restrained, venturing out three separate times to watch the proceedings from the edges of the crowd. Like Carlyle he was impressed by Father Mathew’s appearance, remarking that “his head is really very fine, strength of purpose and resolution are indicated there, if ever they were upon any man” (no. 41). He was also struck by his “expression of benevolence” and in three vignettes depicts his serenity in commanding the crowd’s attention. Given the family’s recent tragedy and Doyle’s “respect and admiration for the reverend gentleman,” one wonders if Father Mathew’s regimen for healing began subtly to persuade him against his father’s more rigid approach, his conviction that the deaths of family members was a direct sign of their own sins. As a figure of power and reverence, a man who unified an enormous family by gathering together the Irish immigrant population and promising to rescue them from the disease of alcoholism, Father Mathew must have seemed an irresistible father-substitute. For Doyle he gradually emerges as a sane version of Solomon Eagle, gently encouraging the people to repent rather than threatening them with damnation, appealing to their best selves, and offering them a practical solution for their afflictions. As Doyle repeatedly says, he “administers the pledge” (my italics), as if an alderman or city official, and does so in “batches,” rewarding those who have taken it with a medal and a ribbon. Such pragmatism appealed to Doyle and, combined with Father Mathew’s moderation, may have indicated to his own father a more direct and effective way of responding to misfortune.

Because Doyle’s vision is always in the end recuperative and redemptive, it is fitting that he balances the subtle criticism of his father on whom, as he says, he will “inflict” the successive letters about Father Mathew, with an image of recovery and triumph (no. 42). In one of his finest letters, which harmoniously blends word and image, Doyle describes a procession of Temperance societies marching toward the meeting grounds near the Great Western Railway. In the midst of bands and banners, Father Mathew rides along in a coach pulled by horses. The procession momentarily slows at the edge of an abrupt slope only to tumble down driven by its own momentum. In a terrifying moment, Father Mathew disappears, his life in jeopardy. Like a surging wave, as Doyle writes, “the whole mass rolls from the top to the bottom.” After a “great gasping for breath” and “another fierce struggle,” however, “the head and shoulders of the reverend gentleman are seen to appear in the crowd.” He is safe and the band rouses itself to strike up, “See the Conquering Hero Comes” (no. 42).

The plunge down the bank reminds us of the earlier May letter where all the figures are falling helplessly in a dark waterfall. But here the resolution is clear: the procession reconstitutes itself, the band resumes its playing, and the figure of authority emerges unscathed, mounting the platform to greet the enthusiastic crowd. Three “doses” of Father Mathew not only dispel the gloom caused by his brother’s premature death but inspire some of his best artwork, a series of marvelously detailed drawings that he hopes will go some of the way toward banishing the “vacancy” from his father’s eyes (no. 36). More important, these letters of August and September 1843 revive his faith in the viability of the paternal figure and begin to repair his confidence in his own father.

THE LETTERS

The fifty-three letters Doyle wrote between July 3, 1842, and December 17, 1843, offer a portrait of the artist as a young man and reveal his rapid aesthetic growth from the age of seventeen, when he is part of a thriving family guild of artists and musicians, to nineteen, as he moves toward independence by assuming his role as one of the main graphic illustrators at Punch magazine. Because this is such a relatively short span of time and because his visual style and sensibility evolve so quickly, it is useful to identify chapters or, in keeping with Doyle’s love of music and opera, movements, in the unfolding narrative. These allow us to detect a change in visual idiom and thematic emphasis and to trace Doyle’s ongoing development as an artist and English gentleman. The most significant transitions in the series are triggered in each case by a political or familial crisis that prompts a shift in visual style and an often greater emphasis on inventive picture-making. While there is little change on the cool bright surface of the prose, the images reveal just how profoundly Doyle has been affected by these various events, especially, as we have seen, by the death of his brother Frank. The letters can be organized into six coherent periods that help chart the progress of his growth over the brief course of sixteen months.

The first five letters, from July 3 to August 14, 1842, serve as prologue to the collection and document a time of domestic tranquility in London. Doyle describes his various cultural excursions and offers his reflections on art. He visits the Italian Opera House and reviews three separate performances; he uses an engraving by Horace Vernet as a pretext for comparing French and English art; he defends the works of Walter Scott against a dinner-party detractor; and, in fine mock-heroic style, he details a home concert by the Doyle children performed before “an enthusiastic audience of three distinct persons.” The first letter immediately sets the warm comic tone of the series. Doyle pretends that he is a celebrity who has arrived late at the opera and is forced to make his way into a tight spot in the upper gallery. He is not certain whether the audience’s boisterous applause is directed at him or Rubini, the renowned opera singer, who has just taken the stage. He goes on to describe “standing at uneasy” in the perilous altitude of the gallery and intermixes comic updates on his discomfort with criticism of the opera. All five of these letters would seem to adhere strictly to the rules of the weekly assignment; they are witty, urbane, and polished, unrolling tight lines of carefully written script across the page. The few vignettes that appear are modest in size and discreetly pushed to the margins. Doyle begins with the idea of a conventional word-dominated letter foremost in his mind.

Everything changes in the sixth letter of August 21, 1842, where the cultural paradise described above, the polite interior world of operas and concerts, is shattered by the Chartist assemblies in London and the threat of violence they portend. For the first time Doyle describes his venture into the streets and the experience, as he says with characteristic understatement, is “rather dangerous.” While watching Queen Victoria on her way to the House of Commons, he is robbed. A thief slides his color box from underneath his coat tails, and Doyle returns home “with mingled feelings of disgust and indignation.” He uses the incident as an opportunity for humor, but his father must have seen the crime for what it was, an immediate threat to the family’s safety, and quickly moved them to a residence in Blackheath, nearly eight miles away. This is the first letter in which the crowd, or what Doyle repeatedly calls “the multitude” emerges as one of his great fascinations. He visually recreates the robbery at the top of the first page, picturing himself among a group of people, and then at the end shows another motley band of citizens reading the Lord Mayor’s posted warning about unlawful assemblies. In his future correspondence, the idea of the potential volatility of the urban mass population, and of bearing witness to street crowds and public spectacles, will both thrill and unsettle him.

The next seven letters, from September 4 to October 16, 1842, record the family’s sojourn at Blackheath, where Doyle finds himself a bit out of his element. As he observes, “Here is your highly intelligent family suddenly transplanted, as it were, to a perfectly new soil, from the aristocratic neighbourhood of Hyde Park to the somewhat cockneyfied and cricket-playing locality of Blackheath,—from the bustle of the Edgeware road to the peaceful vicinity of Greenwich Hospital” (no. 7). No more operas, concerts, or the polite conviviality of dinners, but golf, donkeys, and old age pensioners. Doyle’s choice of subjects suddenly narrows as he is deprived of his customary high-brow material and must turn his attention, at least at first, to local games and customs. That he is surrounded by nature “with views rustic” and “marine” does not help matters, even though his father has encouraged him to make outdoor sketches. As we are beginning to realize, Doyle’s real talents lie in social art, in delineating the human comedy, the variety of the human face, the manners, customs, and dress of the burgeoning middle classes.

To be sure, he has some fun with “The Royal game of Golf,” describing it as if he were a cultural anthropologist, but it is the letters of September [11] and 27, 1842, that stake out new territory for him with his visual designs (nos. 8 and 10). As his muse stalls at the prospect of finding topics of interest in this rural enclave, he resorts to his own imagination for material. In the first letter he creates a wreath of lively characters that encircles the opening page, an image that combines his boyhood interest in medieval legend and fairy tale with memories of paintings he has seen at the London exhibitions. The headpiece comes straight out of an apocalyptic canvas by Benjamin Robert Haydon. A ghastly hooded figure of death looms over the earth, and wraiths and horses explode out of a cloud. Is this Doyle’s way of expressing uneasiness about conditions in London, his fears about family friends who have been left behind? Interestingly, this vision of horror quickly dissolves into an interlocking chain of comic figures cavorting down each side of the page—soldiers, clowns, knights, elves, and animals—all swooping toward a portal at the bottom.³² The second sheet is more whimsical, with various doodlings of animals wearing top hats and boots, a Turkish sultan plunging off a rock and a portrait of Doyle himself staring down a tiger with his “valuable eyes . . . of a color something between green and yellow.” The letter is nearly two pages shy of the assigned length, woefully short on text and signed for only the second time with Doyle’s full name. Perhaps most important, it is the first letter that is watercolored. The figures on the opening page are touched in vivid hues of blue, purple, red, green, and pink. Together, all these features point to a much greater sense of visual play (and daring) as Doyle exploits his stock of images to improvise a series of visual narratives to compensate for his lack of verbal material and his anxieties about the political situation in London.

While less inventive, the letter of September 27, a direct response to Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), continues the exploration of fanciful borders, though it now tropes the letter sheet itself as a stage curtain which is pulled tight by a troupe of diminutive creatures, one of whom bursts through to greet or surprise us (no. 10). The figures at the top, staring out from behind bars, are markedly more grotesque than in the earlier letter, many crouched and grimacing. The central figure, a strange Bacchus-jester accompanied by nymph-consorts, raises an ironic toast to the reader. In this instance, Doyle composes a letter-page at once playful and dark, and follows it up with a revealing anecdote drawn from one of Scott’s essay-letters. It tells of a young man who had “lived too long on town,” was tormented by an imaginary ballet of dancing green goblins, and so fled to the country for relief. The tiny “figurantes” pursue him there nonetheless and he must finally escape abroad. John Doyle could not have overlooked the parallels in this story with his son’s own quasi-banishment at Blackheath. Nor can we avoid the visual rhyme between the young man sitting back and tearing at his hair pictured here and several other self-portraits in the letters, particularly the very last one, which shows Doyle “reclining against the back of his chair . . . looking most melancholy” while the creatures of his fancy work busily around him (no. 53).

The third movement, which records the return to London and the resumption of town life, constitutes the longest run in the collection, numbering fifteen letters from October 22, 1842, to April 9, 1843. The first letter is addressed to his “Father” rather than “Papa” and may signal a new level of maturity prompted by his eighteenth birthday in September (no. 14). Whether or not this is the case, he certainly begins to free himself from the verbal constraints of the letter form and his father’s original instructions which, we may assume, implied that he was to use his visual art mainly to illustrate the text. In this group the border designs become increasingly more intricate and complex, slipping the confines of his written subject as Doyle experiments with frames and starts arranging the letter space to accommodate the text rather than the drawings. It is clear now, in other words, that he is beginning to execute the images first, occasionally cramming the text in the margins, as he does on the third page of the letter of New Year’s Day 1843 (no. 16). His pictorial work is also beginning to cross over to the wide middle space reserved for handwriting, as we see in several letters but particularly those of March 5 [12] (no. 24, p. 3), March 27 (no. 26, p. 1), and April 2 (no. 27, p. 2). Whereas in earlier letters he had reserved the spaces above the salutation and below the signature for his modest vignettes, now larger drawings increasingly break up blocks of text, acting as their own paragraphs. They also begin to push inward from the margins. Sometimes they even infiltrate the written line itself. In the letter of January 7 (no. 17), for example, a row of faces, mimicking letters, fills the line, as do a series of hilarious wind-blown stick figures in January 15 (no. 18, p. 3) and a platform of spectators in May 7 (no. 32, p. 3). At the end of the Christmas letter, part of the text is actually obscured by a ragged, crazy-eyed denizen of the “lower orders” (no. 15). Obviously the word is still paramount, but as we can see from these and the strikingly beautiful opening page of the last letter of this time, [April 9, 1843], Doyle deepens his thinking about the letter as a canvas, generating a fertile space for visual experimentation (no. 28; see plate 3 in the gallery).

The letters in this group resume the metropolitan life with which he began the series—the descriptions of visits to the theater, concerts, picture galleries, and military reviews—but they broaden his range of interest, which becomes more popular and egalitarian. Now he ventures to some of the more sensational London shows, Louis Jullien’s rollicking concerts, the animal-trainer Isaac Van Amburgh’s circus performances, and the Surrey Zoological Gardens, where he and Charles are reduced to hysterical laughter by the “Orang-Otangs,” especially “Jenny,” who wears a lace bonnet and sits in her cage calmly sipping tea. He also walks the streets of London, the “lively thoroughfare” of Oxford Street, for instance, gathering material and gaining inspiration from his observations. As a result, his letter of January 7, 1843, is taken up with two pages of people-watching, a mere sample, as he says, of “the intensely comical countenances that passed me bye” (no. 17). The very next letter, a comic masterpiece, describes an extremely windy day in London and pictures a variety of Victorian pedestrians in various states of sartorial distress. Worst of all are the crinolines and parasols: “Innumerable ladies were being blown into such extraordinary shapes that it was a matter of some difficulty to know whether they were standing on their heads or their feet, whether they were altogether up in the air, whether they were in one whole piece, or in several small particles” (no. 18).

These letters complement the fine latticework of the borders with a brand of documentary realism that extends the scope of Doyle’s vision and moves us from the refined ethos of opera and concert-hall to the teeming life of the metropolis. His letters increasingly stray from their assigned task, the tedious summaries of pictures and plays that fill the letters of his brothers James and Henry, transforming his daily experiences into witty social commentary and improvisational narratives. Although he has an eye for foibles and accidents, and his great strength remains comic hyperbole, Doyle strikes an altogether different chord in his letter of February 15, 1843 (no. 21). When he manages to climb out of bed to mail his weekly letter, he sees two soldiers heading toward the Great Western Railway station, “with immense knapsacks on their backs and their muskets under their arms.” A grenadier has blown a trumpet to muster the troops for departure. He and Henry follow them and light upon two companies of soldiers gathering at the station. Rather than the smartly organized maneuvers of the parade grounds he so admires, Doyle sees scattered groups of soldiers “running up and down, carrying luggage, or speaking to their wives.” They are “wrapped up in their marching costume,” trying to fend off the bitter cold of the morning. One of the finest details in all his letters, reflected as well in his illustration, is his observation that “in one place there was a group of ten or twelve [soldiers] round a little old man who was selling them tea.” All impulse to comedy or to extol the heroism and greatness of British military valor as he does elsewhere subsides in the face of this ritual comfort and the ordinary hubbub of leave-taking. It is as if Doyle has seen these soldiers for the first time, seen beyond the beauty of their uniforms and their regimental drills to their frailty and humanity.³³

The fourth movement of the series, constituting the next eight letters from April 16 to June 25, 1843, represents the period of Frank’s decline and death and coincides with his father’s stay in Acton. They begin with Doyle’s “day dream” sketch of the all-consuming ogre (no. 29), include the surreal procession of floating figures plummeting into the abyss (no. 34; see plate 4 in the gallery), and end with the first letter after Frank’s burial and the elaborate copy of Poole’s Solomon Eagle (no. 36), all of which I discuss in the previous section. In these letters, the excitement over the opening of the Annual Royal Academy Exhibition is tempered by Doyle’s anxiety over his younger brother’s deteriorating condition. And yet this anxiety also yields some of the finest artwork that he has produced, from wildly imaginative and richly colored scenes of universal despair to much lighter, highly finished fairy scenes and realistically drawn episodes from London’s cultural life. Most noteworthy is the sharp contrast in genre and tone that characterizes this group of letters, the rapid oscillation between visual styles and modes of representation within individual letters that signals an unsettled mental state.

To a greater or lesser degree, we can see this contrast at work in all eight of the letters, though it is sufficient here to look at three. The first offers a sketch of a sedate Victorian interior—Doyle and family friends inspecting Sir William Ross’s cartoon for the Westminster Hall competition—only to be followed by the wild vision of the ogre. The second, on April [23, 1843], continues Doyle’s exploration of border designs and opens with an intricately constructed mobile replete with fairy figures, flowers, and fountains and an image of Doyle himself dangling from the structure (no. 30). But the letter abruptly shifts away from fanciful fretwork in the next two pages to the kind of high documentary realism made famous a few years later by William Frith in his vast canvasses depicting swarms of Victorians at the railway station, the beach, and the races. Doyle’s drawings of picnickers engaged in various entertainments on Hampstead Heath are scrupulously representational, indeed nearly photographic, in their avidity to capture holiday customs.³⁴

It is the letter of May 7, 1843, however, that draws the starkest and most insightful contrast (no. 32). Doyle begins with several witty images of ordinary Victorians flying about in “Aereal navigation machines,” gigantic wings that enable them to soar above the terrestrial world. Foremost among the figures are a man and a woman, outfitted in the standard costumes of the nineteenth century, bobbing about with ridiculous aplomb. (At the middle left, Doyle draws himself in one of the contraptions, though he looks less confident than the others.) The next page, however, returns us firmly to the ground, placing us front and center at the State Funeral of the Duke of Sussex, where “the crowd was nothing less than tremendous.” Dick again finds himself amongst the “multitude,” but this time has no fear for his pocket or his person because the metropolitan police are out in such force. As he states, “there must have been a policeman every twelve yards on both sides of the way besides various strong bodies drawn up in different places, as if waiting the word of command to make a general onslaught upon the population, and as if that was not enough there were mounted officers stationed along at regular distances on the whole line.”

We have come a long way since the civil disturbances of August, from which the metropolitan police have clearly learned a great deal. If on the surface Doyle’s precise description of the funeral procession reinforces his love of royal occasions and formal parades, it also serves as an eerie foreshadowing of his brother’s fate. As he will with his detailed copy of Solomon Eagle six weeks later, Doyle sends his father a veiled message that relates his dreadful presentiments about the course of Frank’s illness. The officers of the Blues wear “broad black scarfs and crape hanging from their helmets,” and along with all the principal royalty and nobility seem to anticipate his brother’s approaching death and honor it in Doyle’s favored idiom—a public spectacle. The restless content of his pen-and-ink work in all the drawings of this time, leaping from one mode to another, is a poignant sign of his mental agitation and distress.

The fifth movement of the sequence, comprising thirteen letters between July 2 and October 15, 1843, chronicles the Doyle family’s period of healing and recovery. After his harrowing experience with Frank, John Doyle was apprehensive about the health of his surviving children and sent them to Kensington Gardens to drink the restorative waters from St Agnes’s Well. Concerned too for their spiritual state, he probably suggested that they visit a rally in support of the itinerant Irish minister, Father Theobald Mathew. As I discuss earlier, Richard made three trips to see “the Apostle of Temperance” and witnessed dozens of people taking the pledge of lifelong abstinence from alcohol. But it was not what Father Mathew stood for that attracted Doyle to his rallies or his office as a representative of the Catholic Church. Indeed, Doyle had never shown any interest in religious figures, mentioned the word “God” in previous letters (“Glory be to thanks,” he writes at one point, neatly sidestepping the issue), or reported attending mass early on Sunday mornings at the French Chapel, as his brothers Charles and Henry had done.³⁵ In fact, there is not a single reference to his family’s Catholicism or to religion generally in all these letters despite the repeated claim by biographers and critics that he was a “devout Catholic.”