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

“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 neglecting the golden rule, “i before e except after c,” by writing “concieve” and “recieve,” and then perversely inverts the rule with howlers like “hieght,” “sieze,” and “peir.” He tends to double up on consonants (“Millitary,” “assylum,” “dissappeared,” “duett,” “wittnessing,” “untill,” “litterary”); confuse “affect” and “effect” (no. 2); and occasionally succumb to mild dyslexia (“villiany,” “gaurd,” “Christain”). On occasion he spells a word correctly—“ceiling”—only to misspell it in the very next line, “cieling” (no. 31). Most delightful (and revealing) are the magnificent mash-up in “manoevere” (no. 20), the hint of insanity in the footman of “brief demensions” (no. 39), the dig at the parish authorities who incorrectly “assertain” the time of Father Mathew’s temperance rally (no. 42), and the Keatsian contretemps, “rediculous” (no. 4; no. 18, etc.). None of these missteps hinders the readability of the letters, and all are meaningful enough in psychological terms to be well worth preserving.

      NOTES

      1. I have tracked down three letters of this time from the eldest son, James, to his father, two at the Toronto Public Library (November 12, 1843, and undated) and one at the Folger Library (July 30, 1842).

      2. The Morgan purchased the collection from the New York dealer Lew David Feldman, whose firm, House of El Dieff, specialized in mystery and “Sherlockiana.” The letters were submitted to the Morgan “for examination and approval,” indicating that the collection was offered to the Morgan directly and had not appeared before in an auction or sale catalog.

      3. Peter Quennell, “A Note on Richard Doyle,” Cornhill Magazine 161 (November 1944), 224, and “Richard Doyle—II: A Note by the Editor,” Cornhill Magazine 161 (April 1945), 275. From April 1861 to October 1862, Doyle had published his series, Bird’s Eye Views of Society, in the Cornhill Magazine, then under the editorship of William Thackeray.

      4. Daria Hambourg, Richard Doyle: His Life and Work, English Masters of Black-and-White, gen. ed. Graham Reynolds (London: Art and Technics, 1948).

      5. Rodney Engen, Richard Doyle (Stroud, Glos: Catalpa Press, 1983). He also edited and contributed to the exhibition catalog Richard Doyle and His Family (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983). None of the letters was featured in this exhibition because at this time they were still bound in the album and hence could not have been properly displayed.

      6. For a recent article treating the letters, see Kathryn Shattuck, “Dear Dad, Went to an Exhibition. Wish You Were Here,” New York Times, May 14, 2006, 33. Shattuck annotates the final page of Doyle’s letter of July [2], 1843, describing his visit to the Westminster Hall Cartoons. See also Carolyn Vega, “‘Punchification’ Keeps Richard Doyle from His ‘Christmas Things,’” Huffington Post, December 22, 2011, which reproduces most of the letter of December 17, 1843. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carolyn-vega/richard-doyle-christmas-letter_b_1163719.html.