The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843. Doyle Richard

this time than we have previously known. Within the relatively short span of four and a half years, the Doyle family was beset by a series of painful emotional crises. No sooner had they recovered from one traumatic loss, it must have seemed, than they were laid low by another. The effect was to draw the remaining members of the family closer together, and to tighten the bond between the siblings. Because the losses also focused more attention on their widowed father, these setbacks compelled the children to rally around him and bolster his spirits. This may partially explain the explosion of artistic activity during this time, the children’s almost manic desire to produce artwork that would lighten their father’s mood and, above all, provide comfort and succor.

      In this sense, then, the Sunday shows, the pantomimes, the concerts—all the colorful performances of the early 1840s—represent the children’s attempt symbolically to replace their mother, to substitute for her loss a full and rich world of art. Given that she died and was buried at the height of the Christmas season, it is no accident that every Christmas thereafter Richard threw himself into frantic preparations for the holiday show. It is not from his father that he felt this pressure, as biographers have argued, but, I would contend, from the memory of his mother. As early as October, his output of weekly letters flagged as he anticipated starting on the annual project: “Christmas is drawing near!!! And work is beginning” (no. 14). As the years passed, this ritual grew ever more elaborate, coming to signify the children’s memorial, indeed their gift, to their mother and their testament to the family’s spirit of resilience.

      The fact that Marianne died seven years later than has been thought radically alters our view of Richard’s journal of 1840, which he began almost immediately after her burial. Rather than a whimsical and light-hearted exercise, which “charts his spontaneous humour and boyhood love of adventure” (Engen, 17), it now looks more like an emergency response to a psychological crisis. The unrelenting nature of the humor, the journal’s consistently energetic and upbeat tone, stems less from “the threat of failure in his father’s eyes,” as Engen argues, than from a deep desire to divert their minds. Here is the first entry, of January 1, 1840, a comic masterpiece of muddle accompanied by strains of guilt and self-punishment:

      The first of January. Got up late, very bad. Made good resolutions and did not keep them. Went out and got a cold. Did keep it. First thought I would, then thought I would not, was sure I would, was positive I would not, at last was determined I would, write a journal. Began it. This is it and I began it on the first of January, one thousand eight hundred and forty. Hope I may be skinned alive by wild cats if I don’t go on with it [sketch of a panicked Dick surrounded by leaping cats].²⁵

      Of course the idea of composing a journal was also, like the weekly letters, John Doyle’s own way of finding an outlet to channel his son’s grief. The more Richard worked on his entries, the less time he spent brooding and despondent, though his father’s strategy is obviously the classic formula for repression. We know from a few surviving early works that Richard was already developing a talent for caricature, but his mother’s death may well have been the psychic catalyst for Richard’s lasting commitment to his comic muse. Coming barely three months after his fifteenth birthday, her loss goes part of the way toward explaining why humor and hyberbole not only became so attractive to him but were also so unremitting,²⁶ and why he so rarely dwelt in his writings on sorrow and misfortune. We know from the illustrations in his letters that he witnessed the urgent crises of the day like poverty, hunger, and mass unemployment, but he never mentioned them. Even the Chartist assemblies that he saw, with their potential for street riots and violence, became fodder for his humor. “Things are looking rather dangerous,” he reports to his father on August 21, 1842, and then produces a comic miniature of himself and a lion surprising each other (no. 6). Wit, irony, and comic exaggeration become his modes of survival in these letters, powerful defense mechanisms against the grim external realities of political unrest and the more intimate threats of disease and sudden death.

      It is tempting to see Richard Doyle’s lifelong attachment to childhood and to the illustration of children’s stories and fairy tales as yet another response to personal tragedy, and as his way of perpetually remaining his father’s son, idealizing his early pursuits and transforming them into a productive career. That he never left home, spent nearly his entire adult life under the same roof as his father, and remained a perennial bachelor suggests an unresolved sense of guilt and a profound fear of betraying him. To marry and sire children would be tantamount to abandoning his family and setting up an alternate competing one. Annette and Richard felt the pull to remain their father’s children the most keenly, the brothers James and Henry less so, though they waited a long time to marry and, as mentioned before, never had children. It was only Charles, the youngest, who managed to elude these forces of regression, even though he had to travel as far away as Scotland in order to marry and have children. Still, he paid a high price for his departure, spending most of his adulthood in a battle with alcoholism. He was institutionalized in his final years, and died in an asylum at Dumfries.

      If the death of Richard’s mother represents the calamity that shadows his 1840 journal, it is the death of his younger brother Francis that haunts the letters to his father.²⁷ On the surface, it appears that Frank’s decline and death go unrecorded in these texts. With the exception of one vague sentence in the letter of August 27, 1843, which could be construed as referring to any number of misfortunes, Richard makes no overt mention of Frank’s passing, nor does he refer in earlier letters to an existing precondition or the progress of a specific disease. Frank is mentioned for the last time on September 4, 1842, and, in a letter dated Christmas day of the same year, his name appears in a sketch that lists the seven Doyle children (no. 15). Henceforth he vanishes. As stated in the preface, John Doyle’s removal in late April 1843 to a cottage in Acton five miles from their Paddington residence provides a significant clue that all was not right. He remained in this rural retreat for more than a month and then returned to his London home. During this time he also ceased work on his own political sketches, none of which was published between April 20 and June 30, 1843. Before this period his cartoons had been appearing at regular weekly and biweekly intervals. In a three-week stretch from May 27 to June 25, 1843, Richard too stopped writing his weekly assignments, a hiatus that suggests a period of intense anxiety and then, after about June 10, mourning for his brother.

      For the modern reader, of course, all this evidence is maddeningly indirect, and seems to point to an evasion of emotional responsibility. Where in the letters is the expression of anguish and despair, the protestations against the family’s cruel fate? Where the sympathy and condolence for his father? Most of all, given their strict adherence to Catholicism, where are Doyle’s invocations of God and his turn to the family’s faith for comfort and guidance? When we realize that the original aim of the letters was never confessional, therapeutic, or “personal” in our modern sense, Doyle’s extended silence seems more plausible, less hard-hearted. According to the rules of the assignment, the letters were not meant to indulge in feelings of grief, loss, or guilt. These would have been internalized and worked through privately in prayer or in confession with a priest. Instead, much like Doyle’s earlier journal, the letters were secular reports intended to focus his father’s attention elsewhere and to create aesthetic compensations for the absence of a brother and son.

      This does not mean that Richard’s response to his brother’s death is completely missing from the letters. On the contrary, a lingering grief emerges partly through the visual designs and partly through his choice of more serious subjects in the succeeding months. He may never overtly reveal his emotions in writing, but he does hint at the distress and despair he experienced through his sketches. Two striking examples from this time are the letters of April 16 and May 21, 1843 (nos. 29 and 34), both of which coincide with Frank’s period of illness and his removal to Acton. The first begins innocently enough, as Doyle complains about the lack of a subject and then relates his trip to William Ross’s studio, discussing the artist’s cartoon-in-progress for the Westminster Hall competition. It is familiar territory for Doyle, a template that he has followed numerous times before. The final page, however, offers a stirring departure from the standard paradigm. It presents his father with one of his “day dreams,” a darkly comic vision of various tiny figures marching steadily up the margins toward a gigantic ogre at the top of the page. The creature waits, with its mouth wide open, to engorge them. Strangely,