with seemingly inexhaustible invention. The books become metaphors for the creative process itself, as Doyle coins figure after figure marching across the pages in a ceaseless and wondrous parade of human and animal variability.
Figure 1. Richard Doyle, The Tournament, or The Days of Chivalry Revived (London: J. Dickinson, 1840), p. 2. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. RB 339673.)
Figure 2. Richard Doyle, The Christening Procession of Prince Taffy (London: Fores, 1842), p. 1. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. RB 114221.)
Figure 3. Richard Doyle, “Celestial Guards,” from The Brother to the Moon’s Visit to the Court of Queen Vic (London: Fores, 1842). (HEW 5.3.1, Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
Figure 4. Richard Doyle, handwritten page with illustration from Illustrated Manuscript of the Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, ca. 1840. (MS Eng 843, Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
The culmination of this fertile period is the set of illustrated letters that Doyle produced for his father in 1842–43, heretofore almost completely unknown. I submit that the letters represent Doyle’s apprentice work for Punch, a portfolio of verbal-visual improvisations that not only landed him a coveted position but later served as a source of inspiration during his first few years at the magazine. They are hybrid works that combine calligraphy with finely drawn and occasionally watercolored visual images and represent an ingenious and original achievement. The manuscripts form an epistolary canvas for Doyle’s experimentation with different modes—caricature, comedy, satire, self-portraiture, journalism, documentary realism—which, as the correspondence proceeds, he places in tension with more surreal and grotesque improvisations. The interaction of verbal and visual design is sophisticated, particularly toward the end of the sequence where the images begin to explore sensitive psychological areas that the more socially conscious text glosses over or conceals. The rich testimony vouchsafed by these letters allows us glimpses of the turmoil that tears at the Doyle family during this time, revealing his response to family tragedy and his relationships with his father, his siblings, and various public figures of authority. In a larger sense, the letters also provide valuable evidence of Doyle’s anxieties about national and religious identity and his ambivalence over the London “multitude.” The evidence presented in these manuscript-canvases soundly refutes the conventional view of Doyle as a figure who lived always on the surface. At times a darker and more complex portrait emerges here, one that is infinitely more compelling than that of the charming but predictable illustrator of children’s stories and fairy tales we have come to accept.
The fifty-three illustrated letters of 1842–43 here reproduced, transcribed, and annotated have been published hitherto only in brief extracts. Their absence from Doyle’s corpus has constituted a significant gap in our knowledge of his early years. The letters extend the development of his fine early albums and signify the fruition of an aesthetic style he had been gradually moving toward since his earliest years. In this regard, the steady “Punchification” of his work afterward, from 1843 to 1850, transformed Doyle’s private, more or less spontaneous manuscript inventions into mass-produced magazine fare for public consumption. This is not to say the visual style he adopted at Punch lacks wit or imagination—far from it. Time and again he delivered marvelous visual material under strict deadline and succeeded in captivating a mass audience.12 Rather, the new assignment meant that he began regularizing and repeating his own style to meet the demands of editors, weekly publication, and limitations of space. By the late 1840s his muse was increasingly harnessed by having to prepare designs for the front and back matter of the magazine as well as supplemental work for the annual Pocketbook. Together with series like Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe, which became increasingly repetitive and claustrophobic, these assignments hampered him from developing his style in other directions and in the broader arena of the political cartoon.
THE COMPOSITION OF THE LETTERS
In July 1842 John Doyle set his sons the task of writing him a three-page weekly letter that described their experiences in London.13 Although no instructions or specific guidelines for the assignment are extant, we may gather from the contents of the fifty-three letters by Richard, along with the far fewer surviving manuscripts by his brothers James, Henry, and Charles, that it required them to focus primarily on their cultural experiences and to offer critical commentary on operas, plays, concerts, books, poems, magazines, picture exhibitions, and public events.14 They were also encouraged to recount anecdotes they remembered from their reading or tutorial sessions. Part of the assignment was to supplement their writing with visual sketches drawn from memory. Whether a specific painting, outdoor concert, or military review they had seen, John Doyle charged them with recording the experience visually as well as in writing. Unlike his brothers, Richard devoted more of his time to ordinary events, balancing his aesthetic views with vivid narratives and sketches of day-to-day life in the metropolis.
The deadline for the weekly epistles was set at seven o’clock each Sunday morning, probably because the family needed to be at chapel by eight and had other obligations later in the day.15 Attempting to elicit a modicum of pity from his father, Richard laments this cruel hour in the mock-pathetic tone of his letter of February 15, 1843: “How horrible is the situation of your son. Only ponder for a few moments upon the awful situation of a human creature, who no matter how late he went to bed the night before, is doomed to tear himself from his resting place, his repose, his warm and comfortable couch, (is’int it affecting?) his night cap, his home,—is compelled I say, to rise from his bed” (no. 21). This unfortunate condition is likely the reason John Doyle urged his sons to begin their letters earlier in the week, though it was common to find them all hard at work on Saturday evenings. Happily, there was an incentive (and consolation) for their labors. As Richard reports, John Doyle paid them each five shillings a month for their work. If they missed an assignment, however, they were docked sixpence (no. 21). At least in Richard’s case, there seems to have been a great deal of psychological maneuvering to cajole extensions for late work.
With the exception of two brief periods, which I discuss in the preface, the family all lived together at 17 Cambridge Terrace, Hyde Park. This makes the form of the letter itself, at least at first, oddly superfluous and somewhat puzzling. Why bother writing out the address of a “letter” directed to a family member living under the same roof? For that matter, since the recipient never wrote back, why even use the format of a letter, rather than, say, a notebook, sketchbook, or journal entry? Most enigmatically, why take the trouble of folding the artwork into a neat square package, thus creasing the carefully wrought designs? As far as I can tell from the address sheets and evidence in the letters themselves, there were three methods of delivery: by hand, post, or private courier. In his first letter, dated (or possibly misdated) July 14, 1840, Henry wrote the following in the address space: “For / John Doyle Esqr / at his house in Cambridge Terrace / written this day and / dilivered with his own / hand / Henry.”16 Moreover, Henry omitted the family address from nineteen of his twenty-five letters, inscribing only his father’s name. The majority of Richard’s letters are addressed similarly or to his father, followed by some version of the number, street, and district. In letters toward the end of the series he became less interested in filling out the full address. In fact, the final six letters note his father’s name followed by a scrawl of etceteras. Four letters lack any form of address at all.17
