conjectural, particularly given that the leaves were folded.
What we do know is that Richard inscribed eleven of his letters “paid” or “prepaid,” suggesting that they must have been conveyed through the post. Support for this notion can be found in both the letters of Richard and Henry, where they describe having to awake before seven o’clock and walk to Hyde Park. Although they never state it directly, I can only surmise that they were headed for a postbox or courier office. Why else venture out so early on a Sunday morning? Of course, this still begs the question of why they needed to mail the letters to their own address. Was it John Doyle’s way of authenticating the assignment, emphasizing its seriousness, fulfilling the terms of the original contract? If so, and given the draconian deadline, one finds it hard not to sympathize with Richard’s protests.
Like most private correspondence of this period, these letters were circulated among other family members as well. The brothers shared their letters among themselves and probably with their two sisters before passing them along to their father. As a result, they naturally felt the stirrings of competition and sibling rivalry.18 In his weekly epistle of March 25, 1843, for example, Henry Doyle writes: “As I promised to give you an account of last Saturdays adventure I will keep my promise although greatly discouraged by James’s and Dick’s excellent letters on the same subject.” Did their father, unconsciously or not, encourage his sons to see their letter-writing as a contest? Did he model the assignment on the art exhibitions and cartoon competitions that were the very life’s blood of the London art world during this time? Since his sons often visited the same events together, the spur to originality or, conversely, paralysis, must have been even greater. In the same letter, Henry admits that he will not “attempt” a sketch of a scene on the Hungerford pier because Dick has already “so graphically described” it. Noticing “a great fat man” who falls asleep at the opera in an earlier letter, Henry wishes “Dick had been there to see him that he might make a sketch of him, for I am sure that nothing short of Dick in his funniest humour could have done Justice to him.” And on May 2, 1843, he mentions James’s remarks on the Royal Academy Exhibition, conceding that they are “very just and express my opinion exactly.” The work of his talented older brothers clearly hampered the full expression of Henry’s own artistic sensibility, though to the ordinary viewer many of the sketches in his letters appear just as accomplished as Richard’s and James’s (see fig. 5). Perhaps Charles, the youngest brother, wrote so few of his own letters because, as the last child of a large and talented family, he felt the burden of performance the most acutely.
Figure 5. Henry Doyle, ALS, March 12, 1842, p. 1. (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.)
If unaffected, at least on the surface, by the skill of his brothers’ letters, Richard was nonetheless sensitive to the time pressures of the weekly assignment. Like Henry, who judges one of his sketches a “wretched failure” and another “an infamous lible [sic],” Richard was keenly aware of his father’s high expectations. In his postscript to a letter of September 24, 1843, Richard also admits inadequacy: “Will you be so good as to look upon this letter as a failure?” (no. 47) But the complaint that recurs most often is his lack of a subject. On February 12, 1843, he states: “It sometimes unfortunately happens that I am quite at a loss for a subject whereof to write about” (no. 20); on April 16, “I am without anything to say” (no. 29); on September [3 or 17], 1843: “I really do not know what to write about” (no. 46), and so on. He grumbles over having to fill three sheets of paper and frequently responds by sketching rather than writing. “I am very happy to see that I am half way down my second page,” he announces, “although as yet I have not been able to think of any good subject to write about. Don’t imagine that I have got any interesting or marvellous anecdote to tell you, because you see the above strange assemblage of hobgoblins, for it really does not illustrate any known circumstance either in history or fiction, but was just invented by me for the sake of occupying so much space and thereby having less paper to cover in the writing” (no. 46).
Toward the end of the series of letters, in fact, the visual improvisations not only relieve the labor of handwriting but begin to take precedence. More and more space is allotted to the pen-and-ink designs, which become increasingly elaborate and fanciful, textured with cross-hatching and chiaroscuro. The letter of October 15, 1843, for example, offers a complex visual reenactment of one of his dreams (no. 49); that of November 19, 1843, uses its seven brief words to introduce a bustling three-page carnival of hybrid figures (no. 52; see plates 7–9 in the gallery); and the very last page of the final letter depicts an allegorical self-portrait that is carefully glossed in the text. In these late letters, the London of parks, theaters, galleries, and concert rooms gives way to the teeming metropolis of Doyle’s own mind. Far from inhibiting his artistic faculties, by the final months the pressure of the weekly assignment has generated the most fully realized and dazzling of his visual creations.
The question remains about the ultimate purpose of John Doyle’s unusual assignment to his sons. In the end, why did he commission these weekly productions, which in Richard’s case gradually began to assume the form of graphic compositions rather than conventional letters? In the absence of any hard evidence we can only offer conjectures here. At the most basic level, Doyle may have wanted to keep an eye on his sons as he himself pursued his own career as a political cartoonist and was frequently away from home. London was a city rife with opportunities for trouble, offering an even greater temptation to boys who were schooled at home by tutors. Thus the letters may have served as a kind of disciplinary exercise, a weekly report of his sons’ activities while he was at work. He may also have wanted to keep them preoccupied in the absence of their mother as well as affording their elder sister Annette a respite from minding the children and an opportunity to attend to other household responsibilities.
But all of these reasons are unsatisfying given the actual content and form of the letters themselves. It is far more plausible that Doyle envisioned the assignment as a means of preparation and training for his sons’ professional careers, either as art critics, portrait painters, graphic artists for the exciting new illustrated magazines, or social and political commentators. The letters of James and Henry are full of reflections on pictures, plays, and concerts, and many of Richard’s letters mimic the style and format of the standard exhibition review found in the newspapers and magazines of the day. Lending further credence to this idea is that Doyle remunerated his sons and required that the letters be posted, thus certifying them with a kind of professional seal. He wanted to give the assignment rigor by enforcing a deadline and encouraging his sons to see the task as a journalistic assignment, a real job. In this regard it cannot be an accident that Richard’s position as a graphic illustrator at Punch dovetails beautifully with his increasingly elaborate work in the letters; that in effect, the one assignment leads directly and organically into the other. Taken as a whole, Richard’s collection of letters to his father must have served as an impressive portfolio, a vivid testimony of his skill as a draughtsman, and thus played a key role in earning him the coveted position.19
BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT
John Doyle, Richard’s father, was the son of a tailor. He was born in Dublin in 1797, three years before the Act of Union with Britain, which led to years of social and economic upheaval in Ireland. He attended the Dublin Society’s Drawing Academy and studied with the landscape painter Gaspare Gabrielli and the miniaturist John Comerford. On February 13, 1820, he married Marianne Conan, and the couple had their first child, Annette, in January 1821. Because of the lack of opportunities for a young artist in economically depressed Dublin, the Doyles moved to London at about this time. The early years in the city were difficult as Doyle tried to cultivate patrons and find his footing as an animal and miniature painter. In 1825 he gained some success in conventional oils by exhibiting his first painting at the Royal Academy, Turning Out the Stag, which was followed each
