them into a productive career. That he never left home, spent nearly his entire adult life under the same roof as his father, and remained a perennial bachelor suggests an unresolved sense of guilt and a profound fear of betraying him. To marry and sire children would be tantamount to abandoning his family and setting up an alternate competing one. Annette and Richard felt the pull to remain their father’s children the most keenly, the brothers James and Henry less so, though they waited a long time to marry and, as mentioned before, never had children. It was only Charles, the youngest, who managed to elude these forces of regression, even though he had to travel as far away as Scotland in order to marry and have children. Still, he paid a high price for his departure, spending most of his adulthood in a battle with alcoholism. He was institutionalized in his final years, and died in an asylum at Dumfries.
If the death of Richard’s mother represents the calamity that shadows his 1840 journal, it is the death of his younger brother Francis that haunts the letters to his father.27 On the surface, it appears that Frank’s decline and death go unrecorded in these texts. With the exception of one vague sentence in the letter of August 27, 1843, which could be construed as referring to any number of misfortunes, Richard makes no overt mention of Frank’s passing, nor does he refer in earlier letters to an existing precondition or the progress of a specific disease. Frank is mentioned for the last time on September 4, 1842, and, in a letter dated Christmas day of the same year, his name appears in a sketch that lists the seven Doyle children (no. 15). Henceforth he vanishes. As stated in the preface, John Doyle’s removal in late April 1843 to a cottage in Acton five miles from their Paddington residence provides a significant clue that all was not right. He remained in this rural retreat for more than a month and then returned to his London home. During this time he also ceased work on his own political sketches, none of which was published between April 20 and June 30, 1843. Before this period his cartoons had been appearing at regular weekly and biweekly intervals. In a three-week stretch from May 27 to June 25, 1843, Richard too stopped writing his weekly assignments, a hiatus that suggests a period of intense anxiety and then, after about June 10, mourning for his brother.
For the modern reader, of course, all this evidence is maddeningly indirect, and seems to point to an evasion of emotional responsibility. Where in the letters is the expression of anguish and despair, the protestations against the family’s cruel fate? Where the sympathy and condolence for his father? Most of all, given their strict adherence to Catholicism, where are Doyle’s invocations of God and his turn to the family’s faith for comfort and guidance? When we realize that the original aim of the letters was never confessional, therapeutic, or “personal” in our modern sense, Doyle’s extended silence seems more plausible, less hard-hearted. According to the rules of the assignment, the letters were not meant to indulge in feelings of grief, loss, or guilt. These would have been internalized and worked through privately in prayer or in confession with a priest. Instead, much like Doyle’s earlier journal, the letters were secular reports intended to focus his father’s attention elsewhere and to create aesthetic compensations for the absence of a brother and son.
This does not mean that Richard’s response to his brother’s death is completely missing from the letters. On the contrary, a lingering grief emerges partly through the visual designs and partly through his choice of more serious subjects in the succeeding months. He may never overtly reveal his emotions in writing, but he does hint at the distress and despair he experienced through his sketches. Two striking examples from this time are the letters of April 16 and May 21, 1843 (nos. 29 and 34), both of which coincide with Frank’s period of illness and his removal to Acton. The first begins innocently enough, as Doyle complains about the lack of a subject and then relates his trip to William Ross’s studio, discussing the artist’s cartoon-in-progress for the Westminster Hall competition. It is familiar territory for Doyle, a template that he has followed numerous times before. The final page, however, offers a stirring departure from the standard paradigm. It presents his father with one of his “day dreams,” a darkly comic vision of various tiny figures marching steadily up the margins toward a gigantic ogre at the top of the page. The creature waits, with its mouth wide open, to engorge them. Strangely, the groups of figures move willingly, some eagerly, toward the cavernous mouth, as if to a festive public event. They seem either oblivious of the danger that awaits them or resigned to it.
On closer inspection, the figures comprise an anthology of characters and objects Doyle has sketched in his previous letters—among them, soldiers, cavalry officers, royal carriages, stagecoaches and a steam engine, gentlemen and ladies from the streets of London, domestic animals, Oriental exotics, and a fairy-tale giant shouldering his club. Above the text panel sits a little fat man in a waistcoat and top hat who exhorts the multitudes (and us) to step right up, “come one, come all” to the show, as if he were a circus barker. Is that a coffin beneath him? Does the motley band play trumpets? If we direct our gaze lower, toward the bottom of the page, we might notice something even more peculiar about the source of the crowd itself. The figures appear to be originating or evacuating from a dark hole below the ogre, which suggests an anus. The circulation of the figures from excrement to aliment only magnifies the dreariness of the overall vision. Doyle has transformed the great London spectacle and his favored idiom of the fairy tale into a grotesque loop of feeding and voiding worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. As creations from his own imaginative workforce rise obediently toward the giant maw, it is hard not to see a portrait of Doyle’s own capitulation and helplessness—and a statement about the waste of his art (literally) in forestalling his brother’s illness.
The startling watercolor that flows down the first page of the letter of May 21, 1843, is similarly apocalyptic, though even darker and more surreal (no. 34; see plate 4 in the gallery). Washed in lurid hues of blue, brown, and green, it depicts a floating assembly of figures as they plunge in freefall down the right side of the page. Like the earlier letter it represents an assortment of human and animal types, adding performers from the London shows, ballerinas, and horse-riders. This time, however, Doyle inverts their movement and they all plummet downward, many headfirst and spread-eagled. As if imported from a John Martin landscape, a flurry of female spirits in white flowing gowns enters at the far left, offering some hope until we realize that their bodies are limp and resigned and that they are being pursued by a darker band of figures that wave their arms menacingly. Meanwhile, at the bottom left, Doyle has sketched his version of the evolutionary scale, an insect leading up through a human figure crawling on all fours. Where we anticipate an erect hominid as the pinnacle of this sequence, Doyle gives us two birds struggling to take flight.
The scene could not be more different than the refined portraits of academician Frank Grant that Doyle discusses on the very next page of the letter. Things are not only out of control but out of order: the dancers are shown toppling rather than balancing; the angels are fleeing their own demons rather than comforting those who fall; the evolutionary scale abruptly reverses itself; and all the figures, whether archangels, stage performers, servants, or nobility are jumbled together and falling helplessly into the abyss. There are obviously comic elements—the egg man, the falling top hat and riding crop—but how un-Victorian the scene is! Naked figures, farmyard animals, and ladies in crinoline dresses, their legs wide apart, all tumble headlong in a nightmare landscape. Such a grimly comic vision of chaos, the social order turned topsy-turvy, must surely have sprung from the emotional distress and feelings of helplessness caused by Frank’s illness. The older brother can do nothing for the younger, who grows ever weaker, quarantined in a distant cottage, and his imagination responds by destroying its own creations.28 A week later he gives us what seems to be the only direct image of his grief, a full-page self-portrait, much different in tone from his other comic versions, in which he represents himself wide-eyed and stricken (no. 35).
After Frank’s death, Doyle’s letters return to their earlier, more realistic style, as he sketches copies of artwork from the exhibitions, scenes from London life, and vignettes of excursions taken with his brothers. But the memory of Frank persists. On June 25, 1843, he resumed the weekly letters to his father, ostensibly taking up where he left off with a discussion of the pictures at the Royal Academy exhibition (no. 36). On the first page he makes a detailed sketch of Paul Falconer Poole’s Solomon Eagle Exhorting the People
