The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843. Doyle Richard
artists—that is, active makers and interpreters rather than amanuenses of meaning—but also because of their perceived status as secondary. The author’s text was always considered paramount; the illustrator merely decorated or was charged with the task of simplifying the verbal text to ensure comprehension and mass appeal. As an illustrator of children’s and fairy tales and as a painter of fairy scenes, moreover, Doyle was further disadvantaged. If read at all, these works were considered appropriate only for children, fanciful and innocent, at most harmless fun. By the early 1900s the consensus view was summed up by Anthony R. Montalba, who in his introduction to Doyle’s work repeatedly calls his creations “charming” and defuses the word “satirist” with “gentle”: “He never approached bitterness or indelicacy, and his humourous work is a standing refutation of the preposterous notion that humour cannot exist apart from coarseness.”3 Similarly, The Dictionary of National Biography quietly damned him as “the kindliest of pictorial satirists” and “the most sportive and frolicsome of designers.”4 The American illustrator Joseph Pennell put it more bluntly, calling the majority of his designs “simply rubbish.”5 Small wonder then that Doyle’s first biographer, Lewis Lusk, never found a publisher for his book, though he worked on it for nearly ten years.6 In the first half of the twentieth century Doyle seemed destined to remain a genteel lightweight whose artwork was considered clever and amusing but ultimately superficial.
In 1983 the tide turned briefly with the centenary exhibition of Doyle family artwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum together with the publication of the first full-length biography by Rodney Engen.7 While providing a wealth of information about the Doyle family and plenty of new material, these two events did little to alter critical opinion or attract popular interest. Few scholarly articles appeared as a result, and only one fresh edition of Doyle’s work was published in the succeeding years.8 In spite of Engen’s biography, which went a long way toward providing a more comprehensive overview of his achievement, the standard notion persisted that Doyle was witty and whimsical, a graceful “limner” of fairyland, but a gifted amateur nonetheless. Today most critics believe that he never sustained the brilliance of his seven years at Punch and never, like his more famous colleagues John Leech and John Tenniel, went on to leave a lasting mark on the field of book illustration.9
While his early commitment to magazine publication and book illustration may have injured Doyle’s long-term reputation, it made him very popular in his day. His lively vignettes and initials, along with the elaborate designs for title pages, prefaces, and indices of the Punch biannual volumes, were deftly executed and warmly comic, attracting the attention of Walter Crane, whose early illustrations show a strong influence by Doyle’s work; Edwin Landseer, who encouraged his art students to copy from him; and William Heath Robinson, who was inspired by the cover of Punch. By the late 1840s, members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were studying Doyle’s composition of figures in his series on the Manners and Customs of Ye Englyshe and admiring its iconographic echoes of medieval tapestry. William Holman Hunt and Dante Rossetti were both impressed by Doyle’s powers of observation and attention to details of fashion and physiognomy. And it was precisely this work—Doyle’s witty parodies of polite society—that drew Thackeray and Dickens to him. Both men would commission illustrations for their novels and stories and also become close friends.10
One of the primary claims of the present edition is that Doyle was already a talented and prolific artist before his tenure with Punch, and that the works of his early period have been neglected because of the unorthodox means of their production, their select audience, and their relative scarcity. In an astonishing surge of creativity between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, the young “Dicky Doyle” executed a series of brilliant private and semi-public works. These consisted of unique and often illuminated manuscripts, some published in small editions subscribed by family and friends, others reproduced posthumously in facsimile editions. Between 1840 and 1843, Doyle produced at least ten works of varied genres: The Tournament (1840), Fores National Envelopes (1840), Dick Doyle’s Journal (1840), Comic Histories (1841), Dick Kitcat’s Book of Nonsense (1842), Jack the Giant Killer (1842), Beauty and the Beast (1842), A Grand Historical, Allegorical, Classical and Comical Procession of Remarkable Personages Ancient, Modern and Unknown (1842), The Christening Procession of Prince Taffy (1842), and The Brother to the Moon’s Visit to the Court of Queen Vic (1843) (see figs. 1–4).11 These projects are remarkable for their skillful handling of satire, their beautiful coloring and level of finish, and their maturity. The last three works in particular explore Doyle’s favorite theme of the procession, multiplying characters, facial expressions, and costume with seemingly inexhaustible invention. The books become metaphors for the creative process itself, as Doyle coins figure after figure marching across the pages in a ceaseless and wondrous parade of human and animal variability.
Figure 1. Richard Doyle, The Tournament, or The Days of Chivalry Revived (London: J. Dickinson, 1840), p. 2. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. RB 339673.)
Figure 2. Richard Doyle, The Christening Procession of Prince Taffy (London: Fores, 1842), p. 1. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. RB 114221.)
Figure 3. Richard Doyle, “Celestial Guards,” from The Brother to the Moon’s Visit to the Court of Queen Vic (London: Fores, 1842). (HEW 5.3.1, Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
Figure 4. Richard Doyle, handwritten page with illustration from Illustrated Manuscript of the Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, ca. 1840. (MS Eng 843, Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
The culmination of this fertile period is the set of illustrated letters that Doyle produced for his father in 1842–43, heretofore almost completely unknown. I submit that the letters represent Doyle’s apprentice work for Punch, a portfolio of verbal-visual improvisations that not only landed him a coveted position but later served as a source of inspiration during his first few years at the magazine. They are hybrid works that combine calligraphy with finely drawn and occasionally watercolored visual images and represent an ingenious and original achievement. The manuscripts form an epistolary canvas for Doyle’s experimentation with different modes—caricature, comedy, satire, self-portraiture, journalism, documentary realism—which, as the correspondence proceeds, he places in tension with more surreal and grotesque improvisations. The interaction of verbal and visual design is sophisticated, particularly toward the end of the sequence where the images begin to explore sensitive psychological areas that the more socially conscious text glosses over or conceals. The rich testimony vouchsafed by these letters allows us glimpses of the turmoil that tears at the Doyle family during this time, revealing his response to family tragedy and his relationships with his father, his siblings, and various public figures of authority. In a larger sense, the letters also provide valuable evidence of Doyle’s anxieties about national and religious identity and his ambivalence over the London “multitude.” The evidence presented in these manuscript-canvases soundly refutes the conventional view of Doyle as a figure who lived always on the surface. At times a darker and more complex portrait emerges here, one that is infinitely more compelling than that of the charming but predictable illustrator of children’s stories and fairy tales we have come to accept.
The fifty-three illustrated letters of 1842–43 here reproduced, transcribed, and annotated have been published hitherto only in brief extracts. Their absence from Doyle’s corpus has constituted a