The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843. Doyle Richard
in his chair surrounded by a tiny team of fanciful workers (no. 53). On the whole, Quennell domesticated his subject, arguing that like other Victorian artists, Doyle was aware of the darker vision of Bosch or Goya, but that for him their “nightmare has been broken and saddled and is trotted up as a quiet saddle-horse for innocent family-outings” (275).
In the first complete biography of Doyle published just three years later, Daria Hambourg followed Quennell in excerpting images from the letters, using Doyle’s caricatured self-portrait at a concert as her title page (no. 31), and grouping a series of nine illustrations at the back of the text.4 Her selections differ from Quennell’s, and several fill the page, but they are enlarged or reduced in scale, printed out of chronological order, and wind up looking like distorted snapshots of Doyle’s work. It was not until thirty-five years later that Rodney Engen published the first full-length scholarly biography of Doyle. Written to coincide with the centenary exhibition of his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1983, Engen’s biography provides extensive discussions of Doyle’s patrons and friends, his relationships with authors like Thackeray and Dickens, his later career as a painter of fairy scenes, and his ill-fated love for Blanche Stanley.5 The study also includes valuable appendices that catalog the Doyle family’s book and periodical illustrations as well as their exhibited paintings and watercolors, unpublished work, and posthumous publications. Disappointingly, however, Engen’s book prints only six illustrations from Doyle’s letters to his father, all of which are reduced in size, blurred, and dark. Much of Doyle’s fine attention to detail and mastery of pen-and-ink drawing are obscured by the poor quality of the reproductions.6
DATING THE LETTERS
Accurate dating and sequencing of the letters were initially hampered by three factors: Richard Doyle’s own casual regard for specific days and years; the later addition by another hand of consecutive numbers for all fifty-one letters at the Morgan Library; and the tentative penciled-in dates supplied by this or another editor for a handful of individual letters.7 Trusting Doyle’s own dates and making educated guesses about the three letters that he left undated, a family member or later curator supplied a number at the top left-hand corner of the first page of each manuscript letter. Although well-intentioned, this editorial intervention produced chronological inconsistencies with significant implications for our understanding of Doyle’s development as a young adult and gifted letter writer as well as an aspiring graphic artist and social commentator. I have been able to rearrange the letters into a reliable chronological order based on contemporary references in the letters and their correlation with evidence in the London Times, new information about the deaths of Doyle’s siblings, and internal evidence of two different salutations and two major changes of residence. Some uncertainty remains over more precise dating in several of the letters—that is, over the exact calendar days within specific months of the years 1842 and 1843—but since Doyle noted the correct month on these letters the concern seems less urgent.
Doyle dated, though he probably did not write, the majority of his letters on Sunday morning. As he warns his father in an early letter, he “cannot be expected to have it done as soon as if [he] wrote two pages of Saturday night, which is usually the case.”8 Thus, particularly in 1842, he often began a letter on Saturday evening, “when the other gentry [his brothers] were writing their letters,”9 and finished it on Sunday morning or later that day. This practice led to his occasional confusion of Saturday for Sunday dates, though he clearly inscribes four of the letters “Saturday evening” or “Saturday night,” and five “Sunday Evening.” As his letters became increasingly more elaborate and visually sophisticated, he began them earlier, most likely in the middle of the week, working on them when he could find spare time from his other artistic projects. As he tells his father in August 1843, “Whenever I can have my letter done by Sunday morning, I will, that is, when I find time to begin it some evening in the week.” Evidence of this habit occurs in three instances where he headed a letter “Sunday” and then followed it with a calendar date that fell on the previous Wednesday or Thursday.10 Further evidence of Doyle getting a jump on his weekly assignment can be detected in the carefully ruled paper, neat penmanship, and progressively more intricate border designs and images that come to characterize the later letters.11 By early 1843 he was spending much more time on these manuscripts, returning again and again to polish and refine them.
Several patterns of internal evidence help us establish reliable dates for individual letters and hence a coherent sequence for the collection as a whole. The first is Doyle’s salutation, which begins as “My Dear Papa” and then abruptly shifts to “My Dear Father” after the thirteenth letter.12 Does his eighteenth birthday in September 1842 signal to him the onset of adulthood and imply greater independence? Does something happen during this time to formalize his relationship with his father, thrust him off the paternal knee? Has someone else in the family or a family friend begun to read the letters, prompting him to drop the potentially embarrassing “Papa”? There is simply not enough evidence to offer a plausible conjecture. If Doyle is frustratingly erratic in the dating of his letters, he is a master of consistency in the greeting. After the letter of October 16, 1842, he never again refers to his father as “Papa.” Combined with other internal evidence, this change helps us accurately resituate letters that are out of sequence in the former numbering system.
The changes of address on the final sheet of each letter provide us with additional information to establish a reliable order. The manuscripts reveal that John Doyle lived at three different addresses during the period from July 1842 to December 1843. His primary residence, where most members of the Doyle family continued to live well into middle age, was 17 Cambridge Terrace, Hyde Park, London. Of the fifty-three letters, Richard Doyle addressed forty-one to this location.13 As a result of civil unrest in London, however, the family decided temporarily to leave their dwelling in Cambridge Terrace. On Monday, August 22, 1842, in response to the increasingly dangerous climate surrounding the Chartist assemblies, the Doyle family removed to 2 Dartmouth Terrace, Blackheath, near Greenwich Hospital. They remained there for nearly two months until October 16, 1842, when they returned to London.14 Richard composed and addressed a cluster of seven letters at Blackheath (all to “My Dear Papa”), helping us identify one of the three undated letters in the collection, that of [September 11, 1842].
The second change of address most likely came as a result of the family tragedy mentioned earlier. In late April 1843 John Doyle set up brief residence, as Richard writes, “in a cottage at Acton,” about five miles west of their Hyde Park neighborhood and in those days still a rural outpost. He remained there for about six weeks. Richard addressed five letters to Acton, from April [23] to May [27], 1843, the only correspondence sent to his father when John Doyle was living at a different location. The events described in these letters show that Richard and his siblings remained at Cambridge Terrace. The next existing letter in the sequence is addressed to his father at 17 Cambridge Terrace and is dated June 25, 1843.
In two of the letters Doyle makes a vital error in writing down the year, mistaking 1842 for 1843 and thereby sending an earlier editor down the wrong chronological path. A host of internal evidence demonstrates that the letter Doyle dates “Sunday Morning April 1842” should properly be moved up a year, to Sunday, April [23], [1843]. The implications for this correction are enormous, since it means that the letter that originally stood at the very opening of the sequence in the old numbering system leapfrogs twenty-nine other letters in place. What presented a significant interpretive problem—the gap of two to three months between the first and second letters at the very beginning of the series—thus vanishes and the span of the project occupies a more temporally coherent period. The correction solves another problem that bedeviled me for several months, namely why Doyle would begin his project with such imaginative visual flair only to compose the next seven consecutive letters in a manner so visually parsimonious and verbally dense. Inaugurating the entire series with its intricate latticework of miniature figures and finished vignettes, the letter formerly dated “April 1842” at first seemed like a stylistic anachronism that required its own trellis of explanation. Resituated in late April 1843 it now assumes a more logical position alongside the lively imaginative experiments with frames and border designs that exemplify Doyle’s other letters of this period, and marks a crucial stage in the ongoing development of