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

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 Esq^r / 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 These specific ones, then, appear to have been delivered by hand, though this conclusion must remain 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.