LITMIR.BIZ

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the cavernous mouth, as if to a festive public event. They seem either oblivious of the danger that awaits them or resigned to it.

      On closer inspection, the figures comprise an anthology of characters and objects Doyle has sketched in his previous letters—among them, soldiers, cavalry officers, royal carriages, stagecoaches and a steam engine, gentlemen and ladies from the streets of London, domestic animals, Oriental exotics, and a fairy-tale giant shouldering his club. Above the text panel sits a little fat man in a waistcoat and top hat who exhorts the multitudes (and us) to step right up, “come one, come all” to the show, as if he were a circus barker. Is that a coffin beneath him? Does the motley band play trumpets? If we direct our gaze lower, toward the bottom of the page, we might notice something even more peculiar about the source of the crowd itself. The figures appear to be originating or evacuating from a dark hole below the ogre, which suggests an anus. The circulation of the figures from excrement to aliment only magnifies the dreariness of the overall vision. Doyle has transformed the great London spectacle and his favored idiom of the fairy tale into a grotesque loop of feeding and voiding worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. As creations from his own imaginative workforce rise obediently toward the giant maw, it is hard not to see a portrait of Doyle’s own capitulation and helplessness—and a statement about the waste of his art (literally) in forestalling his brother’s illness.

      The startling watercolor that flows down the first page of the letter of May 21, 1843, is similarly apocalyptic, though even darker and more surreal (no. 34; see plate 4 in the gallery). Washed in lurid hues of blue, brown, and green, it depicts a floating assembly of figures as they plunge in freefall down the right side of the page. Like the earlier letter it represents an assortment of human and animal types, adding performers from the London shows, ballerinas, and horse-riders. This time, however, Doyle inverts their movement and they all plummet downward, many headfirst and spread-eagled. As if imported from a John Martin landscape, a flurry of female spirits in white flowing gowns enters at the far left, offering some hope until we realize that their bodies are limp and resigned and that they are being pursued by a darker band of figures that wave their arms menacingly. Meanwhile, at the bottom left, Doyle has sketched his version of the evolutionary scale, an insect leading up through a human figure crawling on all fours. Where we anticipate an erect hominid as the pinnacle of this sequence, Doyle gives us two birds struggling to take flight.

      The scene could not be more different than the refined portraits of academician Frank Grant that Doyle discusses on the very next page of the letter. Things are not only out of control but out of order: the dancers are shown toppling rather than balancing; the angels are fleeing their own demons rather than comforting those who fall; the evolutionary scale abruptly reverses itself; and all the figures, whether archangels, stage performers, servants, or nobility are jumbled together and falling helplessly into the abyss. There are obviously comic elements—the egg man, the falling top hat and riding crop—but how un-Victorian the scene is! Naked figures, farmyard animals, and ladies in crinoline dresses, their legs wide apart, all tumble headlong in a nightmare landscape. Such a grimly comic vision of chaos, the social order turned topsy-turvy, must surely have sprung from the emotional distress and feelings of helplessness caused by Frank’s illness. The older brother can do nothing for the younger, who grows ever weaker, quarantined in a distant cottage, and his imagination responds by destroying its own creations.²⁸ A week later he gives us what seems to be the only direct image of his grief, a full-page self-portrait, much different in tone from his other comic versions, in which he represents himself wide-eyed and stricken (no. 35).

      After Frank’s death, Doyle’s letters return to their earlier, more realistic style, as he sketches copies of artwork from the exhibitions, scenes from London life, and vignettes of excursions taken with his brothers. But the memory of Frank persists. On June 25, 1843, he resumed the weekly letters to his father, ostensibly taking up where he left off with a discussion of the pictures at the Royal Academy exhibition (no. 36). On the first page he makes a detailed sketch of Paul Falconer Poole’s Solomon Eagle Exhorting the People to Repentance, during the Plague of the Year 1665, and then proceeds to relate its merits (see fig. 6 for Poole’s original). Although his technical appreciation tells us little, his pen-and-ink sketch of the picture offers a visual reminder of the family’s recent loss as well as a perceptive analysis of his father’s mental state.

      Figure 6. Paul Falconer Poole, Solomon Eagle Exhorting the People to Repentance, during the Plague of the Year 1665, 1843. Oil on canvas. (Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, UK / Photo © Sheffield / The Bridgeman Art Gallery.)

      Based on a passage from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, the painting shows a crowded courtyard in a poor district of London where several groups of the sick, dying, and despondent languish. Some figures grieve and some read the Bible. Others play cards or drink, ignoring the scenes of despair around them. In the middle of the composition stands Solomon Eagle wearing only a loincloth with a pan of burning coals on his head. His eyes blaze fanatically as he denounces the scattered crowd, himself unaffected by the plague. Holding a Bible in his left hand and pointing skyward with his right, he cries out that the plague is God’s judgment upon the people and they must repent their sins. In the left middle ground, as Doyle notes (and depicts), “a sick man just risen from his bed . . . emerges from a door with an expression of wildness and at the same time vacancy in his eyes that is terrible to look at, while a woman with a face of horror more terrible still, attempts to pull him back.” In three places Poole represents corpses, most prominently in the far left background, where he depicts a group of figures carrying a body on a raised pallet.

      It can be no coincidence that of the hundreds of artworks on display at the Royal Exhibition of 1843, Doyle chose this particular image to copy in such detail for his father. Everywhere in the picture John Doyle would have seen tableaux of his own family’s recent ordeal. He could not have overlooked the body being borne slowly across the background, which would have summoned painful recollections of Frank’s burial just ten days before. Nor could he have missed the several portraits of fathers who respond to the epidemic in attitudes of paralysis or hysteria. In the text of his letter Doyle draws his father’s attention to the left side because that is where Poole has positioned a motherless family group, whose patriarch looks traumatized and broken, awaiting the end. Two of his daughters pore over Bibles and the third holds a dying or dead infant—all three looking elsewhere for guidance. Similarly, the man in the middle foreground sprawls on the flagstones with his son, gaping helplessly at the preacher. The man at the far right stares blankly at a dead or unconscious female slumped against her sister. And the rest of the men in the painting either slouch on benches or sleep. All are powerless to console their fellow victims in this time of calamity.

      That many of these faces echo that of the protagonist, who is consumed by a religious mania, is no tribute to them. Shadowed by what looks like a symbol of the Black Death, Solomon Eagle comes to announce God’s punishment rather than his mercy. Doyle’s rendering, to be sure, flattens the fierce countenance of the original, but Solomon Eagle nevertheless stands here as a figure of dubious if not dangerous authority. Did Doyle, however unconsciously, intend this portrait of a fanatic as a warning to his own father? Did he see in him a temporary madness brought on by long isolation with his dying son and failure to save him?²⁹ Did he believe that as a result of the crisis his father had embraced his religion with a zeal that threatened his reason and sanity? And what of the mysterious feminine figure who stands behind Solomon Eagle? Veiled and swathed in black, she stands apart from the other characters, a spirit from another realm quietly watching the preacher. Would she have reminded John Doyle of his departed wife, Marianne, returned to witness her husband’s trials and perhaps judge him?³⁰

      However we wish to see it, Doyle’s recreation of Poole’s painting demonstrates to his father that he has not forgotten or fully come to terms with the meaning of Frank’s death. Nor has he been blind to his father’s expressions of despair. In spite of the academic, seemingly impersonal nature of the exercise—the letter is not bordered in black—Doyle manages to examine, even if indirectly, his own and his father’s grief.

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