Today’s Random Illustrations of the Day come from In Fairyland: A Series of Pictures From the Elf-World, a late career “masterpiece” of bookmaking (so several sources say) illustrated by Richard Doyle (1824 – 1883) which I had a chance to see on a recent visit to the Lilly Library. The illustrations are accompanied by a dramatic poem by William Allingham, though I didn’t follow the story very closely (what there was of it) in the course of the book; Allingham’s poetry was a liminal libretto to the sung music of Doyle’s color illustrations. This large, 39 cm book came in gilt-stamped green cloth, with an abundance of extra space on its thick, folio-sized pages.

Richard Doyle was born in 1824, the son of political comic illustrator John Doyle, who went by the pseudonym “HB.” Young “Dicky” Doyle’s career began after he delivered a letter of introduction to the editor of Punch magazine, which Grant F. Scott, editor of The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843, speculates were likely in the form of an illustrated letter so that it would especially demonstrate Doyle’s artistic abilities and his ability to effectively complement his text visually. One of Doyle’s most famous early accomplishments was his creation of the cover design for the fourth issue of Punch, which John Buchanan-Brown (Early Victorian Illustrated Books) notes the magazine wore “for over 100 years.” Buchanan-Brown notes that Doyle’s early drawing style was a mixture of “the outline school” but that Doyle used this style of drawing “both in parody and in earnest,” and Buchanan-Brown credits him for the creation of “witty initial letters and vignettes which mocked the artistically fashionable outline style,” mentioning the series Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe as a prominent example of this. It was through his work at Punch that Doyle became friends with William Makepeace Thackeray and gained some of his commissions to illustrate the author’s books—Thackaray usually illustrated his own books—when the author went on vacation, which is how Doyle got the commission to the illustrate the Newcombes in 1849.

In Fairyland, commonly regarded as Doyle’s masterpiece, was published in 1870. Doyle’s biographer Rodney Engen writes of this book:

[Doyle] produced sixteen watercolour drawings as well as well as initials and binding designs, and borrowed his brother’s colour printer, Edmund Evans, who wood engraved and colour printed the large, folio-sized plates. By so doing, Evans earned the accolade of producing one of the largest colour printed books of the period—a landmark in the art of colour printing from wood blocks.

But as Engen explains, Doyle had been absent for a few years from the lists of comic illustrators, so that Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer,who were to publish the book, put out a ditty to promote the book in the book catalogue Notes on Books:

Where had Dicky Doyle been
All this length of years,
Since Punch wept to miss him
From his merry peers?

Now last, we know
where Dicky Doyle has been!—
He has been to Elf-land
With the Fairy-Queen

Yes, Dick has been in Elf-land
And the pictures which he took
The worthy Messrs Longmans
Have published in a book.

Allingham and Doyle apparently never spoke during the publishing process of the book, and Allingham was angry because there was little attempt made to make his pretty fairy poem and the contents of the pictures comport with each other; in fact, Doyle went so far as to write his own captions, so that while the poem and the pictures are both about fairies, they tell entirely separate and unrelated stories. Overall I found Allingham’s narrative rather ephemeral—what happened again?—whereas Doyle’s illustrations show fanciful encounters between fairies and squirrels, beetles, birds, and a giant mushroom and great ensemble pieces with many fairies and woodland creatures.