July 1842 to December 1843. His primary residence, where most members of the Doyle family continued to live well into middle age, was 17 Cambridge Terrace, Hyde Park, London. Of the fifty-three letters, Richard Doyle addressed forty-one to this location.13 As a result of civil unrest in London, however, the family decided temporarily to leave their dwelling in Cambridge Terrace. On Monday, August 22, 1842, in response to the increasingly dangerous climate surrounding the Chartist assemblies, the Doyle family removed to 2 Dartmouth Terrace, Blackheath, near Greenwich Hospital. They remained there for nearly two months until October 16, 1842, when they returned to London.14 Richard composed and addressed a cluster of seven letters at Blackheath (all to “My Dear Papa”), helping us identify one of the three undated letters in the collection, that of [September 11, 1842].
The second change of address most likely came as a result of the family tragedy mentioned earlier. In late April 1843 John Doyle set up brief residence, as Richard writes, “in a cottage at Acton,” about five miles west of their Hyde Park neighborhood and in those days still a rural outpost. He remained there for about six weeks. Richard addressed five letters to Acton, from April [23] to May [27], 1843, the only correspondence sent to his father when John Doyle was living at a different location. The events described in these letters show that Richard and his siblings remained at Cambridge Terrace. The next existing letter in the sequence is addressed to his father at 17 Cambridge Terrace and is dated June 25, 1843.
In two of the letters Doyle makes a vital error in writing down the year, mistaking 1842 for 1843 and thereby sending an earlier editor down the wrong chronological path. A host of internal evidence demonstrates that the letter Doyle dates “Sunday Morning April 1842” should properly be moved up a year, to Sunday, April [23], [1843]. The implications for this correction are enormous, since it means that the letter that originally stood at the very opening of the sequence in the old numbering system leapfrogs twenty-nine other letters in place. What presented a significant interpretive problem—the gap of two to three months between the first and second letters at the very beginning of the series—thus vanishes and the span of the project occupies a more temporally coherent period. The correction solves another problem that bedeviled me for several months, namely why Doyle would begin his project with such imaginative visual flair only to compose the next seven consecutive letters in a manner so visually parsimonious and verbally dense. Inaugurating the entire series with its intricate latticework of miniature figures and finished vignettes, the letter formerly dated “April 1842” at first seemed like a stylistic anachronism that required its own trellis of explanation. Resituated in late April 1843 it now assumes a more logical position alongside the lively imaginative experiments with frames and border designs that exemplify Doyle’s other letters of this period, and marks a crucial stage in the ongoing development of the young artist’s visual sensibility.
The other major correction resolves the logical contradiction of two letters bearing the same date, August 6, 1842. Both are inscribed “Sunday,” though August 6 actually fell on a Sunday only in 1843. Since Doyle often confused Saturday and Sunday in his letters the perpetual calendar will not help us in this instance. What does help is that the August 6 letter beginning with Doyle’s mention of his second visit to the cartoons could only have been written in August 1843. It was at this time that the Fine Arts Commission displayed the “cartoon” submissions of those artists who had entered the first competition to decorate the new Westminster Hall with frescoes depicting scenes from English history, literature, and mythology. We know that Doyle was one of the first spectators to view the designs and that he returned eagerly several times to study and sketch them. His imagination and ambition were so fired, in fact, that he and his brothers worked on their own cartoons for possible submission to a future competition.15
I have provided a rationale for these two amended dates in footnotes, as I have done for the three letters where Doyle omitted the date altogether, and others where he simply jotted down the month and year. Although several of these dates must remain speculative lacking conclusive proof, they are nonetheless based on convincing internal and contextual evidence. The only letter that I have found impossible to pin down to a specific day of the month is that of July 1843, though the context of taking the water cure at Kensington Gardens places it in the same period as a similar letter of August 27, 1843. We can confidently date other letters in which Richard neglected to supply calendar days—most from the period July through September 1843—by following reports on the contemporary scene in the London Times. Major public events such as the annual Royal Academy Exhibition, the unveiling of the Westminster Hall Cartoons, the several appearances of Father Mathew in London, and the various concerts and military reviews were all announced and reported in the Times, which helps us establish the precise days on which the letters were dated, if not written.
EDITORIAL PROCEDURES
Compared to many of his contemporaries, Richard Doyle wrote in a lucid and legible hand. His penmanship is always neat, even fastidious, the manuscripts showing evidence of meticulous cancelations, rewritings, and crossings-out of individual letters. Moreover, he often ruled the paper with lines that he then erased. This practice adds to the overall appearance of neatness and precision as the clear cursive tilts elegantly across the page. In this regard, his fine calligraphy matches the attention to detail that characterizes his drawings and border decorations, his expert and controlled draughtsmanship. The verbal dimension was as scrupulously composed as the visual, the sprinkling of carets demonstrating that Doyle carefully proofread his work. It is only the rare instance when one encounters a word that is canceled, erased, or indecipherable. Most of the time the pen is steady and the meaning clear. One senses that the text of many of the letters was copied out fair from an earlier draft.
Because Doyle writes with such clarity, and in the interests of enhancing this readability, I have only lightly edited the manuscripts in my transcriptions. Doyle occasionally tripped himself up with punctuation (or lack thereof), and since this might cause some momentary confusion on the part of the modern reader, I have silently inserted commas, hyphens, full stops, quotation and question marks, and apostrophes for contractions and possessives. I have also added capitalization where appropriate (usually at the beginning of a sentence), created paragraph breaks to relieve the eye, used angled brackets to indicate possibly meaningful scorings-out, and in square brackets provided the occasional missing letter or two for coherency. In addition, I have silently corrected the more obvious slips of the pen such as repeated words (“the the”; “to to”) and regularized Doyle’s various fonts, flourishes, and ornamental initials, as well as his oversized script, recognizing that the reader has facsimiles of the manuscripts to hand. For practical and economic reasons, the full-sheet address pages have been omitted from the facsimiles, though I have supplied the information contained in them at the head of my transcriptions. Happily, only two of the fifty-three letters feature address pages with illustrations (nos. 10 and 31), and these I have described in the head-notes.
I have been lenient when it comes to Doyle’s orthography. I have retained the majority of his idiosyncratic misspellings because I believe they reveal vestiges of his lingering youth and innocence that make us more attentive to the borderline between childhood and adulthood (as in the change in salutation from “Papa” to “Father”). These errors also embody the lively and expressive character of the letters themselves and pull gently against the surface precision of his pen and Victorian propriety. So much in the letters is aimed at fulfilling the obligation of the weekly assignment, at pleasing his father, showing him how observant, how mature, how diligent and hard-working he is. By contrast, the misspellings reveal the rampant, excited boy, the “Dicky Doyle” who cannot resist running ahead of the ruled line, chucking the dictionary and exuberantly throwing himself into the life of the anecdotes he relates. These errors nudge the letters from scribal compositions to oral tales. And this is why so many of the mistakes involve phonetic spellings, reflecting how Doyle would have pronounced the words aloud. Hence, for example, he writes “discribe” (no. 2), “disign” (no. 3), “caracature” (no. 11), “purpetrated” (no. 13), “persued” (no. 27), “symtoms” (no. 28), “oppertunities” (no. 29), “pleasunt” (no. 36) and “dispondent” (no. 37). He shares every schoolboy’s weakness of
