was the new art of lithography, however, that eventually ignited his career. In the late 1820s he began creating lithographic portraits of prominent men like the Dukes of Wellington and York, which were then printed, and sold in large numbers. He visited the House of Commons, where he quietly watched the proceedings and then later drew caricatures of statesmen and politicians from memory. Soon he began publishing sketches, the forerunners of today’s political cartoons, under the pseudonym “HB.” In a more tempered and classical style than predecessors James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson or fellow cartoonists like George Cruikshank, Doyle satirized political figures gently and gained a wide following. From 1827 to 1850 he produced 917 of these sketches, carefully guarding his identity and maintaining his anonymity until his retirement.20
In the meantime the Doyle family grew. The Doyles’ first child, Ann Martha (Annette), was followed by James (1822), Richard (1824), Henry (1827), Francis (c. 1829), Adelaide (1831), and Charles (1832). The family moved house several times in the early years in London. By 1833, however, and as a result of John Doyle’s success, they had settled in a fashionable new neighborhood near Hyde Park at 17 Cambridge Terrace, now Sussex Gardens. Most of the children would spend their adult lives there. It was not until 1864 that Richard moved again—with his father and several siblings to 54 Clifton Gardens, Maida Hill—and another ten years before he finally established his own residence, which he shared with his sister Annette. The youngest son, Charles Altamont Doyle, was the only one of the Doyle children to move away for good (to Edinburgh in 1849), and the only one to produce offspring of his own, prodigiously, as it turned out. He and his wife, Mary, had nine children, the second of whom was Arthur Conan Doyle. The brothers James and Henry married late in life and were childless, Richard remained a bachelor until his death, and both his older sister Annette and his aunt Anne took their vows as nuns.
The five years that bookend Richard Doyle’s letters to his father, between 1839 and 1844, were a tumultuous time for the family. Earlier studies have not placed enough emphasis on the events of this period because of uncertainties surrounding key dates. Recent investigations, however, have uncovered enough reliable information to help us clarify the exact sequence of events during this time.21 Until very recently, biographers of the Doyle family believed that John’s wife, Marianne, died in 1832, shortly after giving birth to their last child, Charles.22 The recent discovery of her death certificate reveals that in fact she lived for another seven years, dying of a “Diseased Heart” at the age of forty-four on December 11, 1839. At about this time, Marianne’s brother, Michael Conan, who was a barrister and a freelance literary, music, and drama critic, moved in temporarily to help the Doyle family. He brought with him his two sisters, Anne and Elizabeth.23
A few years later, Richard’s younger brother Francis (“Frank”) also passed away, though the exact date and cause of his death have long been a matter of debate. At one point in his biography, Rodney Engen states that he “died about 1840” (13), only to claim later that “about 1843 Francis . . . became ill and died” (35). Georgina Doyle admits that the date of his death “is a mystery,” though like Phillip Bergem she leans toward early 1843. Although I have not been able to track down Francis’s death certificate, I did locate his burial record at the London Metropolitan Archives. It gives the date and place of his interment as June 15, 1843, in the South Metropolitan Cemetery, now known as Norwood Cemetery in Lambeth. This would put his death a few days earlier, between June 10 and 14, 1843. A Conan Doyle biographer has maintained that Francis died in a typhoid epidemic but offers no supporting evidence.24 Neither is there any evidence for the claims of other scholars who speculate that he died of consumption, though his sister did succumb to this disease only ten months later. Adelaide (“Adele”) died on April 2, 1844, at the age of thirteen, and like her mother and older brother was buried in the South Metropolitan Cemetery.
The death of Richard’s mother, combined with the tragic early deaths of two younger siblings, offers a dramatically different and much more somber picture of this time than we have previously known. Within the relatively short span of four and a half years, the Doyle family was beset by a series of painful emotional crises. No sooner had they recovered from one traumatic loss, it must have seemed, than they were laid low by another. The effect was to draw the remaining members of the family closer together, and to tighten the bond between the siblings. Because the losses also focused more attention on their widowed father, these setbacks compelled the children to rally around him and bolster his spirits. This may partially explain the explosion of artistic activity during this time, the children’s almost manic desire to produce artwork that would lighten their father’s mood and, above all, provide comfort and succor.
In this sense, then, the Sunday shows, the pantomimes, the concerts—all the colorful performances of the early 1840s—represent the children’s attempt symbolically to replace their mother, to substitute for her loss a full and rich world of art. Given that she died and was buried at the height of the Christmas season, it is no accident that every Christmas thereafter Richard threw himself into frantic preparations for the holiday show. It is not from his father that he felt this pressure, as biographers have argued, but, I would contend, from the memory of his mother. As early as October, his output of weekly letters flagged as he anticipated starting on the annual project: “Christmas is drawing near!!! And work is beginning” (no. 14). As the years passed, this ritual grew ever more elaborate, coming to signify the children’s memorial, indeed their gift, to their mother and their testament to the family’s spirit of resilience.
The fact that Marianne died seven years later than has been thought radically alters our view of Richard’s journal of 1840, which he began almost immediately after her burial. Rather than a whimsical and light-hearted exercise, which “charts his spontaneous humour and boyhood love of adventure” (Engen, 17), it now looks more like an emergency response to a psychological crisis. The unrelenting nature of the humor, the journal’s consistently energetic and upbeat tone, stems less from “the threat of failure in his father’s eyes,” as Engen argues, than from a deep desire to divert their minds. Here is the first entry, of January 1, 1840, a comic masterpiece of muddle accompanied by strains of guilt and self-punishment:
The first of January. Got up late, very bad. Made good resolutions and did not keep them. Went out and got a cold. Did keep it. First thought I would, then thought I would not, was sure I would, was positive I would not, at last was determined I would, write a journal. Began it. This is it and I began it on the first of January, one thousand eight hundred and forty. Hope I may be skinned alive by wild cats if I don’t go on with it [sketch of a panicked Dick surrounded by leaping cats].25
Of course the idea of composing a journal was also, like the weekly letters, John Doyle’s own way of finding an outlet to channel his son’s grief. The more Richard worked on his entries, the less time he spent brooding and despondent, though his father’s strategy is obviously the classic formula for repression. We know from a few surviving early works that Richard was already developing a talent for caricature, but his mother’s death may well have been the psychic catalyst for Richard’s lasting commitment to his comic muse. Coming barely three months after his fifteenth birthday, her loss goes part of the way toward explaining why humor and hyberbole not only became so attractive to him but were also so unremitting,26 and why he so rarely dwelt in his writings on sorrow and misfortune. We know from the illustrations in his letters that he witnessed the urgent crises of the day like poverty, hunger, and mass unemployment, but he never mentioned them. Even the Chartist assemblies that he saw, with their potential for street riots and violence, became fodder for his humor. “Things are looking rather dangerous,” he reports to his father on August 21, 1842, and then produces a comic miniature of himself and a lion surprising each other (no. 6). Wit, irony, and comic exaggeration become his modes of survival in these letters, powerful defense mechanisms against the grim external realities of political unrest and the more intimate threats of disease and sudden death.
It is tempting to see Richard Doyle’s lifelong attachment to childhood and to the illustration of children’s stories and fairy tales as yet another response to personal tragedy, and as his way of perpetually remaining
