choice of subjects suddenly narrows as he is deprived of his customary high-brow material and must turn his attention, at least at first, to local games and customs. That he is surrounded by nature “with views rustic” and “marine” does not help matters, even though his father has encouraged him to make outdoor sketches. As we are beginning to realize, Doyle’s real talents lie in social art, in delineating the human comedy, the variety of the human face, the manners, customs, and dress of the burgeoning middle classes.
To be sure, he has some fun with “The Royal game of Golf,” describing it as if he were a cultural anthropologist, but it is the letters of September [11] and 27, 1842, that stake out new territory for him with his visual designs (nos. 8 and 10). As his muse stalls at the prospect of finding topics of interest in this rural enclave, he resorts to his own imagination for material. In the first letter he creates a wreath of lively characters that encircles the opening page, an image that combines his boyhood interest in medieval legend and fairy tale with memories of paintings he has seen at the London exhibitions. The headpiece comes straight out of an apocalyptic canvas by Benjamin Robert Haydon. A ghastly hooded figure of death looms over the earth, and wraiths and horses explode out of a cloud. Is this Doyle’s way of expressing uneasiness about conditions in London, his fears about family friends who have been left behind? Interestingly, this vision of horror quickly dissolves into an interlocking chain of comic figures cavorting down each side of the page—soldiers, clowns, knights, elves, and animals—all swooping toward a portal at the bottom.32 The second sheet is more whimsical, with various doodlings of animals wearing top hats and boots, a Turkish sultan plunging off a rock and a portrait of Doyle himself staring down a tiger with his “valuable eyes . . . of a color something between green and yellow.” The letter is nearly two pages shy of the assigned length, woefully short on text and signed for only the second time with Doyle’s full name. Perhaps most important, it is the first letter that is watercolored. The figures on the opening page are touched in vivid hues of blue, purple, red, green, and pink. Together, all these features point to a much greater sense of visual play (and daring) as Doyle exploits his stock of images to improvise a series of visual narratives to compensate for his lack of verbal material and his anxieties about the political situation in London.
While less inventive, the letter of September 27, a direct response to Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), continues the exploration of fanciful borders, though it now tropes the letter sheet itself as a stage curtain which is pulled tight by a troupe of diminutive creatures, one of whom bursts through to greet or surprise us (no. 10). The figures at the top, staring out from behind bars, are markedly more grotesque than in the earlier letter, many crouched and grimacing. The central figure, a strange Bacchus-jester accompanied by nymph-consorts, raises an ironic toast to the reader. In this instance, Doyle composes a letter-page at once playful and dark, and follows it up with a revealing anecdote drawn from one of Scott’s essay-letters. It tells of a young man who had “lived too long on town,” was tormented by an imaginary ballet of dancing green goblins, and so fled to the country for relief. The tiny “figurantes” pursue him there nonetheless and he must finally escape abroad. John Doyle could not have overlooked the parallels in this story with his son’s own quasi-banishment at Blackheath. Nor can we avoid the visual rhyme between the young man sitting back and tearing at his hair pictured here and several other self-portraits in the letters, particularly the very last one, which shows Doyle “reclining against the back of his chair . . . looking most melancholy” while the creatures of his fancy work busily around him (no. 53).
The third movement, which records the return to London and the resumption of town life, constitutes the longest run in the collection, numbering fifteen letters from October 22, 1842, to April 9, 1843. The first letter is addressed to his “Father” rather than “Papa” and may signal a new level of maturity prompted by his eighteenth birthday in September (no. 14). Whether or not this is the case, he certainly begins to free himself from the verbal constraints of the letter form and his father’s original instructions which, we may assume, implied that he was to use his visual art mainly to illustrate the text. In this group the border designs become increasingly more intricate and complex, slipping the confines of his written subject as Doyle experiments with frames and starts arranging the letter space to accommodate the text rather than the drawings. It is clear now, in other words, that he is beginning to execute the images first, occasionally cramming the text in the margins, as he does on the third page of the letter of New Year’s Day 1843 (no. 16). His pictorial work is also beginning to cross over to the wide middle space reserved for handwriting, as we see in several letters but particularly those of March 5 [12] (no. 24, p. 3), March 27 (no. 26, p. 1), and April 2 (no. 27, p. 2). Whereas in earlier letters he had reserved the spaces above the salutation and below the signature for his modest vignettes, now larger drawings increasingly break up blocks of text, acting as their own paragraphs. They also begin to push inward from the margins. Sometimes they even infiltrate the written line itself. In the letter of January 7 (no. 17), for example, a row of faces, mimicking letters, fills the line, as do a series of hilarious wind-blown stick figures in January 15 (no. 18, p. 3) and a platform of spectators in May 7 (no. 32, p. 3). At the end of the Christmas letter, part of the text is actually obscured by a ragged, crazy-eyed denizen of the “lower orders” (no. 15). Obviously the word is still paramount, but as we can see from these and the strikingly beautiful opening page of the last letter of this time, [April 9, 1843], Doyle deepens his thinking about the letter as a canvas, generating a fertile space for visual experimentation (no. 28; see plate 3 in the gallery).
The letters in this group resume the metropolitan life with which he began the series—the descriptions of visits to the theater, concerts, picture galleries, and military reviews—but they broaden his range of interest, which becomes more popular and egalitarian. Now he ventures to some of the more sensational London shows, Louis Jullien’s rollicking concerts, the animal-trainer Isaac Van Amburgh’s circus performances, and the Surrey Zoological Gardens, where he and Charles are reduced to hysterical laughter by the “Orang-Otangs,” especially “Jenny,” who wears a lace bonnet and sits in her cage calmly sipping tea. He also walks the streets of London, the “lively thoroughfare” of Oxford Street, for instance, gathering material and gaining inspiration from his observations. As a result, his letter of January 7, 1843, is taken up with two pages of people-watching, a mere sample, as he says, of “the intensely comical countenances that passed me bye” (no. 17). The very next letter, a comic masterpiece, describes an extremely windy day in London and pictures a variety of Victorian pedestrians in various states of sartorial distress. Worst of all are the crinolines and parasols: “Innumerable ladies were being blown into such extraordinary shapes that it was a matter of some difficulty to know whether they were standing on their heads or their feet, whether they were altogether up in the air, whether they were in one whole piece, or in several small particles” (no. 18).
These letters complement the fine latticework of the borders with a brand of documentary realism that extends the scope of Doyle’s vision and moves us from the refined ethos of opera and concert-hall to the teeming life of the metropolis. His letters increasingly stray from their assigned task, the tedious summaries of pictures and plays that fill the letters of his brothers James and Henry, transforming his daily experiences into witty social commentary and improvisational narratives. Although he has an eye for foibles and accidents, and his great strength remains comic hyperbole, Doyle strikes an altogether different chord in his letter of February 15, 1843 (no. 21). When he manages to climb out of bed to mail his weekly letter, he sees two soldiers heading toward the Great Western Railway station, “with immense knapsacks on their backs and their muskets under their arms.” A grenadier has blown a trumpet to muster the troops for departure. He and Henry follow them and light upon two companies of soldiers gathering at the station. Rather than the smartly organized maneuvers of the parade grounds he so admires, Doyle sees scattered groups of soldiers “running up and down, carrying luggage, or speaking to their wives.” They are “wrapped up in their marching costume,” trying to fend off the bitter cold of the morning. One of the finest details in all his letters, reflected as well in his illustration, is his observation that “in one place there was a group of ten or twelve [soldiers] round a little old man who was selling them tea.” All impulse to comedy or to extol
