“Apostle of Temperance” who was visiting London at this time and exhorting people to take the pledge of sobriety. Father Mathew was enjoying considerable success in his tour of England and Scotland, garnering widespread coverage in the newspapers, drawing massive crowds at his rallies and recruiting thousands to his cause. Thomas Carlyle had accidentally happened on him in Manchester and was struck by his broad build, strikingly handsome face, and charismatic voice; indeed, he was so deeply moved by his simple speech that he “almost cried to listen to him,” and when it was over tipped his hat. Several weeks later, his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, responded to Father Mathew with even greater enthusiasm, at one point during a London rally swinging herself up to the platform by a rope and landing “in a horizontal position at his feet.”31
Doyle was no less taken by him, though characteristically more restrained, venturing out three separate times to watch the proceedings from the edges of the crowd. Like Carlyle he was impressed by Father Mathew’s appearance, remarking that “his head is really very fine, strength of purpose and resolution are indicated there, if ever they were upon any man” (no. 41). He was also struck by his “expression of benevolence” and in three vignettes depicts his serenity in commanding the crowd’s attention. Given the family’s recent tragedy and Doyle’s “respect and admiration for the reverend gentleman,” one wonders if Father Mathew’s regimen for healing began subtly to persuade him against his father’s more rigid approach, his conviction that the deaths of family members was a direct sign of their own sins. As a figure of power and reverence, a man who unified an enormous family by gathering together the Irish immigrant population and promising to rescue them from the disease of alcoholism, Father Mathew must have seemed an irresistible father-substitute. For Doyle he gradually emerges as a sane version of Solomon Eagle, gently encouraging the people to repent rather than threatening them with damnation, appealing to their best selves, and offering them a practical solution for their afflictions. As Doyle repeatedly says, he “administers the pledge” (my italics), as if an alderman or city official, and does so in “batches,” rewarding those who have taken it with a medal and a ribbon. Such pragmatism appealed to Doyle and, combined with Father Mathew’s moderation, may have indicated to his own father a more direct and effective way of responding to misfortune.
Because Doyle’s vision is always in the end recuperative and redemptive, it is fitting that he balances the subtle criticism of his father on whom, as he says, he will “inflict” the successive letters about Father Mathew, with an image of recovery and triumph (no. 42). In one of his finest letters, which harmoniously blends word and image, Doyle describes a procession of Temperance societies marching toward the meeting grounds near the Great Western Railway. In the midst of bands and banners, Father Mathew rides along in a coach pulled by horses. The procession momentarily slows at the edge of an abrupt slope only to tumble down driven by its own momentum. In a terrifying moment, Father Mathew disappears, his life in jeopardy. Like a surging wave, as Doyle writes, “the whole mass rolls from the top to the bottom.” After a “great gasping for breath” and “another fierce struggle,” however, “the head and shoulders of the reverend gentleman are seen to appear in the crowd.” He is safe and the band rouses itself to strike up, “See the Conquering Hero Comes” (no. 42).
The plunge down the bank reminds us of the earlier May letter where all the figures are falling helplessly in a dark waterfall. But here the resolution is clear: the procession reconstitutes itself, the band resumes its playing, and the figure of authority emerges unscathed, mounting the platform to greet the enthusiastic crowd. Three “doses” of Father Mathew not only dispel the gloom caused by his brother’s premature death but inspire some of his best artwork, a series of marvelously detailed drawings that he hopes will go some of the way toward banishing the “vacancy” from his father’s eyes (no. 36). More important, these letters of August and September 1843 revive his faith in the viability of the paternal figure and begin to repair his confidence in his own father.
THE LETTERS
The fifty-three letters Doyle wrote between July 3, 1842, and December 17, 1843, offer a portrait of the artist as a young man and reveal his rapid aesthetic growth from the age of seventeen, when he is part of a thriving family guild of artists and musicians, to nineteen, as he moves toward independence by assuming his role as one of the main graphic illustrators at Punch magazine. Because this is such a relatively short span of time and because his visual style and sensibility evolve so quickly, it is useful to identify chapters or, in keeping with Doyle’s love of music and opera, movements, in the unfolding narrative. These allow us to detect a change in visual idiom and thematic emphasis and to trace Doyle’s ongoing development as an artist and English gentleman. The most significant transitions in the series are triggered in each case by a political or familial crisis that prompts a shift in visual style and an often greater emphasis on inventive picture-making. While there is little change on the cool bright surface of the prose, the images reveal just how profoundly Doyle has been affected by these various events, especially, as we have seen, by the death of his brother Frank. The letters can be organized into six coherent periods that help chart the progress of his growth over the brief course of sixteen months.
The first five letters, from July 3 to August 14, 1842, serve as prologue to the collection and document a time of domestic tranquility in London. Doyle describes his various cultural excursions and offers his reflections on art. He visits the Italian Opera House and reviews three separate performances; he uses an engraving by Horace Vernet as a pretext for comparing French and English art; he defends the works of Walter Scott against a dinner-party detractor; and, in fine mock-heroic style, he details a home concert by the Doyle children performed before “an enthusiastic audience of three distinct persons.” The first letter immediately sets the warm comic tone of the series. Doyle pretends that he is a celebrity who has arrived late at the opera and is forced to make his way into a tight spot in the upper gallery. He is not certain whether the audience’s boisterous applause is directed at him or Rubini, the renowned opera singer, who has just taken the stage. He goes on to describe “standing at uneasy” in the perilous altitude of the gallery and intermixes comic updates on his discomfort with criticism of the opera. All five of these letters would seem to adhere strictly to the rules of the weekly assignment; they are witty, urbane, and polished, unrolling tight lines of carefully written script across the page. The few vignettes that appear are modest in size and discreetly pushed to the margins. Doyle begins with the idea of a conventional word-dominated letter foremost in his mind.
Everything changes in the sixth letter of August 21, 1842, where the cultural paradise described above, the polite interior world of operas and concerts, is shattered by the Chartist assemblies in London and the threat of violence they portend. For the first time Doyle describes his venture into the streets and the experience, as he says with characteristic understatement, is “rather dangerous.” While watching Queen Victoria on her way to the House of Commons, he is robbed. A thief slides his color box from underneath his coat tails, and Doyle returns home “with mingled feelings of disgust and indignation.” He uses the incident as an opportunity for humor, but his father must have seen the crime for what it was, an immediate threat to the family’s safety, and quickly moved them to a residence in Blackheath, nearly eight miles away. This is the first letter in which the crowd, or what Doyle repeatedly calls “the multitude” emerges as one of his great fascinations. He visually recreates the robbery at the top of the first page, picturing himself among a group of people, and then at the end shows another motley band of citizens reading the Lord Mayor’s posted warning about unlawful assemblies. In his future correspondence, the idea of the potential volatility of the urban mass population, and of bearing witness to street crowds and public spectacles, will both thrill and unsettle him.
The next seven letters, from September 4 to October 16, 1842, record the family’s sojourn at Blackheath, where Doyle finds himself a bit out of his element. As he observes, “Here is your highly intelligent family suddenly transplanted, as it were, to a perfectly new soil, from the aristocratic neighbourhood of Hyde Park to the somewhat cockneyfied and cricket-playing locality of Blackheath,—from the bustle of the Edgeware road to the peaceful vicinity of Greenwich Hospital” (no. 7). No
