The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843. Doyle Richard
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