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

      This is the first annotated scholarly edition of fifty-three illustrated letters that Richard “Dicky” Doyle sent to his father, John Doyle, between July 1842 and December 1843. A handful of visual extracts from the letters have appeared before, the most recent thirty years ago, but nothing like a comprehensive edition of the series has ever been published and is long overdue. Richard Doyle produced the letters as part of a weekly assignment beginning when he was seventeen years old. For a number of personal and professional reasons, as I explore more fully in the introduction, John Doyle charged Richard and his brothers with the task of describing their daily activities in a weekly epistle. He encouraged them to attend important cultural and civic events in London, to reflect on what they had learned from their formal schooling, and to enhance their verbal accounts with sketches and drawings. For their labors he paid them in coin, though he fined them if they missed or were late with an assignment.

      The Doyles were one of the most artistically