It is as if Doyle has seen these soldiers for the first time, seen beyond the beauty of their uniforms and their regimental drills to their frailty and humanity.33
The fourth movement of the series, constituting the next eight letters from April 16 to June 25, 1843, represents the period of Frank’s decline and death and coincides with his father’s stay in Acton. They begin with Doyle’s “day dream” sketch of the all-consuming ogre (no. 29), include the surreal procession of floating figures plummeting into the abyss (no. 34; see plate 4 in the gallery), and end with the first letter after Frank’s burial and the elaborate copy of Poole’s Solomon Eagle (no. 36), all of which I discuss in the previous section. In these letters, the excitement over the opening of the Annual Royal Academy Exhibition is tempered by Doyle’s anxiety over his younger brother’s deteriorating condition. And yet this anxiety also yields some of the finest artwork that he has produced, from wildly imaginative and richly colored scenes of universal despair to much lighter, highly finished fairy scenes and realistically drawn episodes from London’s cultural life. Most noteworthy is the sharp contrast in genre and tone that characterizes this group of letters, the rapid oscillation between visual styles and modes of representation within individual letters that signals an unsettled mental state.
To a greater or lesser degree, we can see this contrast at work in all eight of the letters, though it is sufficient here to look at three. The first offers a sketch of a sedate Victorian interior—Doyle and family friends inspecting Sir William Ross’s cartoon for the Westminster Hall competition—only to be followed by the wild vision of the ogre. The second, on April [23, 1843], continues Doyle’s exploration of border designs and opens with an intricately constructed mobile replete with fairy figures, flowers, and fountains and an image of Doyle himself dangling from the structure (no. 30). But the letter abruptly shifts away from fanciful fretwork in the next two pages to the kind of high documentary realism made famous a few years later by William Frith in his vast canvasses depicting swarms of Victorians at the railway station, the beach, and the races. Doyle’s drawings of picnickers engaged in various entertainments on Hampstead Heath are scrupulously representational, indeed nearly photographic, in their avidity to capture holiday customs.34
It is the letter of May 7, 1843, however, that draws the starkest and most insightful contrast (no. 32). Doyle begins with several witty images of ordinary Victorians flying about in “Aereal navigation machines,” gigantic wings that enable them to soar above the terrestrial world. Foremost among the figures are a man and a woman, outfitted in the standard costumes of the nineteenth century, bobbing about with ridiculous aplomb. (At the middle left, Doyle draws himself in one of the contraptions, though he looks less confident than the others.) The next page, however, returns us firmly to the ground, placing us front and center at the State Funeral of the Duke of Sussex, where “the crowd was nothing less than tremendous.” Dick again finds himself amongst the “multitude,” but this time has no fear for his pocket or his person because the metropolitan police are out in such force. As he states, “there must have been a policeman every twelve yards on both sides of the way besides various strong bodies drawn up in different places, as if waiting the word of command to make a general onslaught upon the population, and as if that was not enough there were mounted officers stationed along at regular distances on the whole line.”
We have come a long way since the civil disturbances of August, from which the metropolitan police have clearly learned a great deal. If on the surface Doyle’s precise description of the funeral procession reinforces his love of royal occasions and formal parades, it also serves as an eerie foreshadowing of his brother’s fate. As he will with his detailed copy of Solomon Eagle six weeks later, Doyle sends his father a veiled message that relates his dreadful presentiments about the course of Frank’s illness. The officers of the Blues wear “broad black scarfs and crape hanging from their helmets,” and along with all the principal royalty and nobility seem to anticipate his brother’s approaching death and honor it in Doyle’s favored idiom—a public spectacle. The restless content of his pen-and-ink work in all the drawings of this time, leaping from one mode to another, is a poignant sign of his mental agitation and distress.
The fifth movement of the sequence, comprising thirteen letters between July 2 and October 15, 1843, chronicles the Doyle family’s period of healing and recovery. After his harrowing experience with Frank, John Doyle was apprehensive about the health of his surviving children and sent them to Kensington Gardens to drink the restorative waters from St Agnes’s Well. Concerned too for their spiritual state, he probably suggested that they visit a rally in support of the itinerant Irish minister, Father Theobald Mathew. As I discuss earlier, Richard made three trips to see “the Apostle of Temperance” and witnessed dozens of people taking the pledge of lifelong abstinence from alcohol. But it was not what Father Mathew stood for that attracted Doyle to his rallies or his office as a representative of the Catholic Church. Indeed, Doyle had never shown any interest in religious figures, mentioned the word “God” in previous letters (“Glory be to thanks,” he writes at one point, neatly sidestepping the issue), or reported attending mass early on Sunday mornings at the French Chapel, as his brothers Charles and Henry had done.35 In fact, there is not a single reference to his family’s Catholicism or to religion generally in all these letters despite the repeated claim by biographers and critics that he was a “devout Catholic.”
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