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