Doyle’s letters to his father have been published before only in small selections and never en suite. Extracts from several of the more visually arresting manuscripts have often been reproduced but usually to the detriment of their integrity as designs within a specific context and larger sequence. Scholars or journalists have reprinted single pages from letters or have plucked individual vignettes or decorations from their calligraphic context and printed them separately. These images have been deployed mainly as fragmentary “quotes,” and as such the visual material tends to lose both the richness of its specific context within a given letter and its larger place within the evolution of Doyle’s thinking as an artist, illustrator, and social commentator. To be fair, the letters were in the possession of Adrian Conan Doyle until the early 1970s and therefore difficult of access. No doubt these material conditions restricted efforts to publish more than a handful of reproductions. Practical considerations of space and cost—the expensive proposition of reproducing all fifty-three manuscripts as high-quality facsimiles—have also militated against the publication of all the letters. This contingency along with a lingering perception of Doyle as a lightweight—a charming, talented, and witty but finally amateur draughtsman—has kept these vibrant and psychologically complex letters from public view.
As far as I know, the first publication of excerpts from the letters, accompanied by a brief commentary, appeared in the Cornhill Magazine for November 1944 and April 1945.3 Calling them “a fascinating sheaf of letters” from “a peculiarly Victorian genius,” Peter Quennell, editor of the magazine, included eleven reproductions that demonstrate the versatility of Doyle’s imagination and his whimsical visual style (“A Note on Richard Doyle,” 224). With World War II grinding on for yet another year and London in ruins, Quennell decided to emphasize the therapeutic charm of the illustrations and their lively recreation of the city: “the eye rambles delightedly across page after page of spirited improvisations, lyrical, grotesque, sentimental and fantastic, street-scenes and self portraits and caricatures and landscapes, in a long imaginative panorama of London of an hundred years ago” (224). Quennell saw the letters as a nostalgic balm for contemporary ills, “the arabesques and acrobatics described by Richard Doyle’s pen-nib” acting as perfect anodyne for war weariness (“Richard Doyle—II,” 275). Among the illustrations, he included the following: several of Doyle’s head- and tailpieces that show finely detailed street scenes and sketches of Victorians at play; the Temperance procession tumbling down the hill (no. 42); the gallimaufry of grotesques in Doyle’s sketchbook letter (no. 52; see plates 7–9 in the gallery); and the two largest and most compelling self-portraits, depicting Doyle in a parody of the typical Royal Academy portrait of that year (no. 35) and, in the final letter, slumped in his chair surrounded by a tiny team of fanciful workers (no. 53). On the whole, Quennell domesticated his subject, arguing that like other Victorian artists, Doyle was aware of the darker vision of Bosch or Goya, but that for him their “nightmare has been broken and saddled and is trotted up as a quiet saddle-horse for innocent family-outings” (275).
In the first complete biography of Doyle published just three years later, Daria Hambourg followed Quennell in excerpting images from the letters, using Doyle’s caricatured self-portrait at a concert as her title page (no. 31), and grouping a series of nine illustrations at the back of the text.4 Her selections differ from Quennell’s, and several fill the page, but they are enlarged or reduced in scale, printed out of chronological order, and wind up looking like distorted snapshots of Doyle’s work. It was not until thirty-five years later that Rodney Engen published the first full-length scholarly biography of Doyle. Written to coincide with the centenary exhibition of his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1983, Engen’s biography provides extensive discussions of Doyle’s patrons and friends, his relationships with authors like Thackeray and Dickens, his later career as a painter of fairy scenes, and his ill-fated love for Blanche Stanley.5 The study also includes valuable appendices that catalog the Doyle family’s book and periodical illustrations as well as their exhibited paintings and watercolors, unpublished work, and posthumous publications. Disappointingly, however, Engen’s book prints only six illustrations from Doyle’s letters to his father, all of which are reduced in size, blurred, and dark. Much of Doyle’s fine attention to detail and mastery of pen-and-ink drawing are obscured by the poor quality of the reproductions.6
DATING THE LETTERS
Accurate dating and sequencing of the letters were initially hampered by three factors: Richard Doyle’s own casual regard for specific days and years; the later addition by another hand of consecutive numbers for all fifty-one letters at the Morgan Library; and the tentative penciled-in dates supplied by this or another editor for a handful of individual letters.7 Trusting Doyle’s own dates and making educated guesses about the three letters that he left undated, a family member or later curator supplied a number at the top left-hand corner of the first page of each manuscript letter. Although well-intentioned, this editorial intervention produced chronological inconsistencies with significant implications for our understanding of Doyle’s development as a young adult and gifted letter writer as well as an aspiring graphic artist and social commentator. I have been able to rearrange the letters into a reliable chronological order based on contemporary references in the letters and their correlation with evidence in the London Times, new information about the deaths of Doyle’s siblings, and internal evidence of two different salutations and two major changes of residence. Some uncertainty remains over more precise dating in several of the letters—that is, over the exact calendar days within specific months of the years 1842 and 1843—but since Doyle noted the correct month on these letters the concern seems less urgent.
Doyle dated, though he probably did not write, the majority of his letters on Sunday morning. As he warns his father in an early letter, he “cannot be expected to have it done as soon as if [he] wrote two pages of Saturday night, which is usually the case.”8 Thus, particularly in 1842, he often began a letter on Saturday evening, “when the other gentry [his brothers] were writing their letters,”9 and finished it on Sunday morning or later that day. This practice led to his occasional confusion of Saturday for Sunday dates, though he clearly inscribes four of the letters “Saturday evening” or “Saturday night,” and five “Sunday Evening.” As his letters became increasingly more elaborate and visually sophisticated, he began them earlier, most likely in the middle of the week, working on them when he could find spare time from his other artistic projects. As he tells his father in August 1843, “Whenever I can have my letter done by Sunday morning, I will, that is, when I find time to begin it some evening in the week.” Evidence of this habit occurs in three instances where he headed a letter “Sunday” and then followed it with a calendar date that fell on the previous Wednesday or Thursday.10 Further evidence of Doyle getting a jump on his weekly assignment can be detected in the carefully ruled paper, neat penmanship, and progressively more intricate border designs and images that come to characterize the later letters.11 By early 1843 he was spending much more time on these manuscripts, returning again and again to polish and refine them.
Several patterns of internal evidence help us establish reliable dates for individual letters and hence a coherent sequence for the collection as a whole. The first is Doyle’s salutation, which begins as “My Dear Papa” and then abruptly shifts to “My Dear Father” after the thirteenth letter.12 Does his eighteenth birthday in September 1842 signal to him the onset of adulthood and imply greater independence? Does something happen during this time to formalize his relationship with his father, thrust him off the paternal knee? Has someone else in the family or a family friend begun to read the letters, prompting him to drop the potentially embarrassing “Papa”? There is simply not enough evidence to offer a plausible conjecture. If Doyle is frustratingly erratic in the dating of his letters, he is a master of consistency in the greeting. After the letter of October 16, 1842, he never again refers to his father as “Papa.” Combined with other internal evidence, this change helps us accurately resituate letters that are out of sequence in the former numbering system.
The changes of address on the final sheet of each letter provide us with additional information to establish a reliable order.
