fig. 6 for Poole’s original). Although his technical appreciation tells us little, his pen-and-ink sketch of the picture offers a visual reminder of the family’s recent loss as well as a perceptive analysis of his father’s mental state.
Figure 6. Paul Falconer Poole, Solomon Eagle Exhorting the People to Repentance, during the Plague of the Year 1665, 1843. Oil on canvas. (Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, UK / Photo © Sheffield / The Bridgeman Art Gallery.)
Based on a passage from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, the painting shows a crowded courtyard in a poor district of London where several groups of the sick, dying, and despondent languish. Some figures grieve and some read the Bible. Others play cards or drink, ignoring the scenes of despair around them. In the middle of the composition stands Solomon Eagle wearing only a loincloth with a pan of burning coals on his head. His eyes blaze fanatically as he denounces the scattered crowd, himself unaffected by the plague. Holding a Bible in his left hand and pointing skyward with his right, he cries out that the plague is God’s judgment upon the people and they must repent their sins. In the left middle ground, as Doyle notes (and depicts), “a sick man just risen from his bed . . . emerges from a door with an expression of wildness and at the same time vacancy in his eyes that is terrible to look at, while a woman with a face of horror more terrible still, attempts to pull him back.” In three places Poole represents corpses, most prominently in the far left background, where he depicts a group of figures carrying a body on a raised pallet.
It can be no coincidence that of the hundreds of artworks on display at the Royal Exhibition of 1843, Doyle chose this particular image to copy in such detail for his father. Everywhere in the picture John Doyle would have seen tableaux of his own family’s recent ordeal. He could not have overlooked the body being borne slowly across the background, which would have summoned painful recollections of Frank’s burial just ten days before. Nor could he have missed the several portraits of fathers who respond to the epidemic in attitudes of paralysis or hysteria. In the text of his letter Doyle draws his father’s attention to the left side because that is where Poole has positioned a motherless family group, whose patriarch looks traumatized and broken, awaiting the end. Two of his daughters pore over Bibles and the third holds a dying or dead infant—all three looking elsewhere for guidance. Similarly, the man in the middle foreground sprawls on the flagstones with his son, gaping helplessly at the preacher. The man at the far right stares blankly at a dead or unconscious female slumped against her sister. And the rest of the men in the painting either slouch on benches or sleep. All are powerless to console their fellow victims in this time of calamity.
That many of these faces echo that of the protagonist, who is consumed by a religious mania, is no tribute to them. Shadowed by what looks like a symbol of the Black Death, Solomon Eagle comes to announce God’s punishment rather than his mercy. Doyle’s rendering, to be sure, flattens the fierce countenance of the original, but Solomon Eagle nevertheless stands here as a figure of dubious if not dangerous authority. Did Doyle, however unconsciously, intend this portrait of a fanatic as a warning to his own father? Did he see in him a temporary madness brought on by long isolation with his dying son and failure to save him?29 Did he believe that as a result of the crisis his father had embraced his religion with a zeal that threatened his reason and sanity? And what of the mysterious feminine figure who stands behind Solomon Eagle? Veiled and swathed in black, she stands apart from the other characters, a spirit from another realm quietly watching the preacher. Would she have reminded John Doyle of his departed wife, Marianne, returned to witness her husband’s trials and perhaps judge him?30
However we wish to see it, Doyle’s recreation of Poole’s painting demonstrates to his father that he has not forgotten or fully come to terms with the meaning of Frank’s death. Nor has he been blind to his father’s expressions of despair. In spite of the academic, seemingly impersonal nature of the exercise—the letter is not bordered in black—Doyle manages to examine, even if indirectly, his own and his father’s grief. (He will depict his own grief far more overtly two years later in an illustration for Dickens’s The Chimes; see fig. 7.) He reappropriates Solomon Eagle as a portrait of his own family that embodies his unspoken anxieties about their fragile condition and his fears that the healing process may take a radical turn. It is important to note here that Henry Doyle resumed his own letters on exactly the same date, June 25, 1843, and that he too copied a painting from the Royal Exhibition that subtly telegraphed his grief. The work that he chose, Richard Redgrave’s The Poor Teacher, is a far more conventional treatment of mourning, however, and a picture of consolation rather than horror. As Henry writes, “There is a beautiful expression of calm sadness upon her face which I never saw surpassed, and I never saw a tear so beautifully introduced as that little one which is slowly rolling down her cheek” (see fig. 8). Unlike his brother, who confronts a variety of desperate responses to the prospect of death in Solomon Eagle, Henry sentimentalizes his family’s sorrow, finding in Redgrave’s portrait a traditional expression of suffering and resignation.
Figure 7. Richard Doyle, illustration for “Third Quarter,” from Charles Dickens, The Chimes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1845). (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. RB 122301.)
Figure 8. Henry Doyle, ALS, Sunday, June 25, 1843, p. 4. (The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MA 3315. Purchased on the Fellows Fund with special assistance of Mr. and Mrs. Walter H. Page, 1974. Photographic credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.)
Further evidence of his father’s delicate emotional state arises in Richard’s subsequent letters of July through September 1843. As a result of Frank’s death and as a way to ensure their own survival, John Doyle prescribed the fashionable “cold water cure” for his remaining children. The new science of hydropathy had only recently begun to attract attention with the publication of influential books and public lectures by Drs. James Wilson and James Gully, who set up a famous water cure establishment at Malvern. Pure water was declared essential in maintaining health and preventing diseases. Hydropathists recommended drinking and bathing in pure water combined with vigorous exercises such as hill walking and running. They also advocated a simple diet, frequent breaks from mental activity, and the cultivation of habits of regularity and sobriety.
Early each morning, consequently, Doyle sent his children to “drink the waters” from St. Agnes’s Well in Kensington Gardens and “systematically run up and down hills” (no. 39). More than a month later, they were still following the regime “with a perseverance that does infinite credit to all the parties concerned,” as Richard reports, though he confesses that he has noticed no improvement in his constitution (no. 44). During the first cure, in fact, he says that he was “seized” with a head cold. Nevertheless, he uses the outings as an opportunity to observe a gallery of characters who will later serve his imagination, and gently mocks his father’s excessive care: “one morning last week when I was kept at home by tooth ache, I really felt quite uncomfortable all day, to think that I had not seen the respectable old woman who keeps the glasses, the foreigner who drinks seven or eight moderate sized tumblers full, taking a walk between every couple, the man who washed his face at the spring, . . . to think that I had not seen any of these interesting people for the space of forty eight hours—it was really quite shocking to think of, I declare” (no. 44).
A more serious indication of concern for
