The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843. Doyle Richard
artist and illustrator best known for designing the iconic cover of Punch, the leading satirical magazine of the day. His father, John Doyle, was an important political cartoonist who engaged the British public for years as the anonymous “HB.” Richard’s older brother, James, was an oil painter, illustrator, and historian; his younger brother Henry was a portrait painter and museum director for the National Gallery of Ireland; and most notably, their nephew (son of their youngest brother, Charles) was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Richard Doyle was precocious—at the age of twelve he illustrated a series of episodes from Homer and at fifteen published his first book. He composed the illustrated letters to his father between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, and this fact, combined with their fine drawing and high degree of finish, makes them remarkable. But they are not merely the beautiful evidence of a prodigy. In a series of brilliant and vivid manuscript canvases, Doyle offers a young man’s observations of Victorian customs and society. He visits operas, plays, parades, picture exhibitions, military reviews, and zoos. He watches the queen as she visits the House of Commons and he witnesses the state funeral of the Duke of Sussex. He is caught up in the Chartist riots of August 1842 and is robbed during one of the melees. He attends the rallies in support of Father Theobald Mathew, the Irish “Apostle of Temperance.” And he provides numerous illustrations of ordinary people strolling the streets, massing at railway stations, and swarming the parks and picture galleries of the metropolis. At the very least, the myriad pen-and-ink sketches offer a fresh perspective on major social and cultural events of London during the early 1840s.
Doyle’s journal letters reveal themselves as much more than simple snapshots of urban life, however. Many explore anxieties about his family and the tragic early deaths of two of his siblings. They contain absorbing and symbolic visual images that lend depth to the comic gait and easy glide of his prose. While the letters that appear early in the sequence are generally light in tone and revel in caricature and social satire, the later manuscripts offer a more somber picture of his emotional state. These letters include dream-like and experimental drawings that combine representational modes and imagine complex visions of apocalypse and mass doom. Doyle creates hybrid compositions that blend his urban experience, visual memory of contemporary pictures, and fascination with fairy tale, legend, and mythology. Reading the letters as a complete series for the first time affords us the opportunity to see the evolution of Doyle’s visual thinking and his increasing maturity as an artist over the brief course of sixteen months.
PROVENANCE
It was only very recently that Richard Doyle’s letters to his father became accessible to the public as individual manuscripts that could be exhibited and conveniently studied. After John Doyle’s death in 1868, the group of at least seventy-nine letters to him by his sons Richard, Henry, and Charles descended to Richard Doyle.1 After Richard’s death in 1883, his elder brother James oversaw the estate and presumably gave the letters to his nephew, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom Richard had always been on good terms. Conan Doyle’s son, Adrian Conan Doyle (d. 1970), eventually inherited the collection, and in 1974 the letters were purchased by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where they are currently held.2 In 2005 the letters were disbound from their album for the purpose of conservation and display. At some point before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gathered them together, two of Richard’s letters, dated October 16, 1842, and October 15, 1843, must have been separated from the original sequence. Around 1925 they were acquired by Henry Folger from Maggs of London, and they now form part of the Folger Library’s collection in Washington, D.C. In the present edition, these two letters have been happily reunited with their fellows.
Since his father may have granted him a week’s reprieve now and then, it is not entirely clear how many of Richard’s letters are missing. Given periodic two-week gaps in the chronology, however, I suspect there are at least a dozen letters that are now lost or have found their way into private collections. Between the first letter of July 3, 1842, and the last of December 17, 1843—a more or less consistent march of sixteen and a half months—the reader encounters three other significant gaps. The first, from October 22 to December 25, 1842, covers a typically hectic time for the Doyle family. We may assume that Richard was busy with preparations for the family’s annual Christmas show and also with other family collaborations such as the illustrations to Jack the Giant Killer and Beauty and the Beast.
The second month-long gap, between May [27] and June 25, 1843, is easier to account for because it coincides with a family tragedy that I examine closely in the introduction. The third hiatus, between November 19 and December 17, 1843, is satisfactorily explained by Richard’s demanding new job as an illustrator for Punch magazine. During these feverish weeks he was spending more time away from home, meeting the staff and executing designs on strict deadline, learning the skill of wood engraving, and working on his own “Cartoons,” his entries for one of the later competitions to decorate the rebuilt Westminster Hall with frescoes. On the first page of his letter of December 17, 1843, the colorful figure of Punch bursts through the letter plane, serving as urgent testimony to the demands of his new job and the rapid “Punchification” of his life. Similar evidence of strain is revealed in his pleading for an extension on the annual Christmas performance. Doubtless in fulfilling his new commitments and responding to the busy social life that accompanied his position, Richard felt that his father would forgive him for skipping a few of the Sunday numbers. After all, at age nineteen he had now become a professional artist. Taken as a whole, then, these weekly journal-letters, along with his other teenage projects and publications, constitute the brilliant apprenticeship of his brief but dazzling career at Punch.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
Richard Doyle’s letters to his father have been published before only in small selections and never en suite. Extracts from several of the more visually arresting manuscripts have often been reproduced but usually to the detriment of their integrity as designs within a specific context and larger sequence. Scholars or journalists have reprinted single pages from letters or have plucked individual vignettes or decorations from their calligraphic context and printed them separately. These images have been deployed mainly as fragmentary “quotes,” and as such the visual material tends to lose both the richness of its specific context within a given letter and its larger place within the evolution of Doyle’s thinking as an artist, illustrator, and social commentator. To be fair, the letters were in the possession of Adrian Conan Doyle until the early 1970s and therefore difficult of access. No doubt these material conditions restricted efforts to publish more than a handful of reproductions. Practical considerations of space and cost—the expensive proposition of reproducing all fifty-three manuscripts as high-quality facsimiles—have also militated against the publication of all the letters. This contingency along with a lingering perception of Doyle as a lightweight—a charming, talented, and witty but finally amateur draughtsman—has kept these vibrant and psychologically complex letters from public view.
As far as I know, the first publication of excerpts from the letters, accompanied by a brief commentary, appeared in the Cornhill Magazine for November 1944 and April 1945.3 Calling them “a fascinating sheaf of letters” from “a peculiarly Victorian genius,” Peter Quennell, editor of the magazine, included eleven reproductions that demonstrate the versatility of Doyle’s imagination and his whimsical visual style (“A Note on Richard Doyle,” 224). With World War II grinding on for yet another year and London in ruins, Quennell decided to emphasize the therapeutic charm of the illustrations and their lively recreation of the city: “the eye rambles delightedly across page after page of spirited improvisations, lyrical, grotesque, sentimental and fantastic, street-scenes and self portraits and caricatures and landscapes, in a long imaginative panorama of London of an hundred years ago” (224). Quennell saw the letters as a nostalgic balm for contemporary ills, “the arabesques and acrobatics described by Richard Doyle’s pen-nib” acting as perfect anodyne for war weariness (“Richard Doyle—II,” 275). Among the illustrations, he included the following: several of Doyle’s head- and tailpieces that show finely detailed street scenes and sketches of Victorians at play; the Temperance procession tumbling down the hill (no. 42); the gallimaufry of grotesques in Doyle’s sketchbook letter (no. 52; see plates 7–9 in the gallery); and the two largest and most compelling self-portraits, depicting Doyle in