The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843. Doyle Richard
7. A curator penciled in call numbers for the two letters at the Folger Library, which are also labeled, “1” and “2.”
8. August [14], 1842.
9. July 3, 1842.
10. See letter nos. 11, 35, and 42.
11. Only one letter is formally dated Wednesday (no. 10, September 27, 1842), though it actually falls on a Tuesday in 1842. Might this have been his birthday?
12. Three letters after this time begin simply, “Dear Father.”
13. A handful of letters do not carry the Hyde Park address but imply it. They are directed to “J. Doyle Esqre” or “J. Doyle Esqre / & & &.” Richard abbreviated this address when he was rushed, especially toward the end of 1843. For more on the issue of addressing and “mailing” the letters, see the introduction.
14. Given his career as a political caricaturist and the necessity of his propinquity to the seat of government, it is likely that John Doyle returned to Cambridge Terrace earlier than his children, and that he commuted back and forth several times during their stay in Blackheath.
15. See Doyle’s sketch of the brothers working on their collective cartoon in the letter of August [13], 1843 (no. 41).
Acknowledgments
My first debt is to the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, where I spent many pleasant hours admiring and studying Richard Doyle’s letters. It was during the museum’s reopening exhibition in 2006 that I first encountered one of Doyle’s letters. After studying material by Joseph Severn and Richard Monckton Milnes for several hours, I decided to stretch my legs and see the Morgan’s exhibition of illustrated letters. There, lo and behold, I found Doyle, spectacularly modest in a corner, deferring to Emily Brontë, Carroll, and Wilde. His single letter, however, was by far the most detailed and imaginative of the group. Since I was fortunate enough to have access to the manuscript collection, I asked the curator if the Morgan owned any additional Doyle material. As it turned out, they did. Fifty more letters! And thus began one of the most delightful digressions of my career. I thank Christine Nelson for introducing me to the letters, providing helpful information about their provenance, and fielding my inquiries over the past few years.
My second and far more lasting debt is to Daniel and Carol Wilson, whose fund has made possible the color publication of a number of these facsimile letters. I owe them, John Ramsay and Mike Huber, who also contributed precious funds from the Provost’s Office at Muhlenberg College, my sincere gratitude for their belief in the project and their continuing generosity. Without their enthusiasm and support this book may never have seen the light of day.
For their superb genealogical detective work on the Doyle family, I thank Phillip G. Bergem and Georgina Doyle; for his advice, Rodney K. Engen; and for reading the manuscript and offering superb critical commentary, Juliet McMaster. It’s a much better and more accurate edition for her knowledge of the Doyle family and her discerning eye. At Muhlenberg, Kristin Brodt helped in procuring hard-to-find volumes through interlibrary loan; Grace Gardella provided preliminary transcripts; Dave Huber printed crisp reproductions of Doyle’s letters; and Rudi McCauley lent her expertise (and patience) in creating individual electronic files of Doyle’s letters from the Morgan’s CD. At Penn State Lehigh Valley, Judy Mishriki facilitated my access to the London Times and other databases, and at Lehigh University Diana Toolan wheeled in many volumes of Punch for my perusal (ungrudgingly). Along with Mark Canney and Sharon Wiles-Young, she was also very kind in generating multiple scans of the magazine’s covers and cartoons. For their careful archival work I also thank Elizabeth Scudder at the London Metropolitan Archives and Georgiana Ziegler at the Folger Library. As always, Markéta and Oliver provided their bemused endorsements of my esoteric labors. “You’re working on a dude named Dicky?” Yes, quite happily. “Cool.”
Abbreviations
| Baker | Michael Baker, The Doyle Diary: The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery (New York and London: Paddington Press, 1978) |
| Bergem | Phillip G. Bergem, The Family and Residences of Arthur Conan Doyle, 3rd rev. ed. (St. Paul, MN: Picardy Place Press, 2007) |
| Booth | Martin Booth, The Doctor, The Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997) |
| DFR | Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1789–1799, ed. Samuel F. Scott and Barry Rothaus (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985) |
| G. Doyle | Georgina Doyle, Out of the Shadows: The Untold Story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s First Family (Ashcroft, British Columbia: Calabash Press, 2004) |
| Engen | Rodney Engen, Richard Doyle (Stroud, Glos: Catalpa Press, 1983) |
| Graves | Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and Their Works . . . 8 vols (London, 1906) |
| Grove Art | The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove, 1996) |
| LMA | London Metropolitan Archives |
| McMaster | Dick Doyle’s Journal, ed. Juliet McMaster et al., 3 vols. (Sydney, Australia: Juvenilia Press, 2006–9) |
| ODNB | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) |
| OED | Oxford English Dictionary |
| Robertson | David A. Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) |
The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843
Introduction
Richard Doyle is best known today for his relationship to his more famous nephew, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and for his work as the illustrator who designed the famous cover of Punch magazine. He is also remembered for his illustrations of fairy tales and children’s stories, and for his folio edition, In Fairyland (1869), a masterpiece of the book arts. In 1843, at the age of nineteen, he became one of the principal graphic artists for Punch, devising hundreds of ornamental initials, border designs, caricatures, and political cartoons over the course of his seven-year career. After resigning from Punch, Doyle set out on a long career as a book illustrator, creating designs for popular works by authors such as Dickens and Thackeray, and publishing his own series of cartoon sketches in the comic adventure The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson (1854). Toward the end of his life he abandoned the medium of illustration for watercolor, sending his work to the Grosvenor Gallery and the Royal Exhibition. When he died in 1883 at the age of fifty-nine, his fairy painting and watercolors had already fallen out of fashion. A retrospective of his work at the Grosvenor Gallery, followed a year later by his estate sale, generated only modest interest.1
The decline in Doyle’s reputation after his death was made worse by a number of biographical and material circumstances. He was trained at home by his father, the political cartoonist and satirist John Doyle (“HB”), and never attended the Royal Academy Schools. Nor was he apprenticed to a professional working painter or studio. Although he loved the RA exhibitions, at least as a young man, and although one of his great ambitions was to be made an academician, he did not display his first painting there until 1868, by which time he was forty-four years old.2 Near the end of his career in the late 1870s his pictures at last began to appear regularly in the galleries, but because they were executed in the less durable medium of watercolor they proved hard to sell. Many of his ingenious earlier sketches and family productions never made it to the public eye, remaining for years in private hands and eventually descending to the special collections of libraries and museums.
Doyle’s reputation in the twentieth century was handicapped by his commitment