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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mysterious & startling images by Arthur Conan Doyle's father,
This review is from: The Doyle diary: The last great Conan Doyle mystery: With a Holmesian investigation into the strange and curious case of Charles Altamont Doyle (Hardcover)
Just leafing through these pages reveals a fascinating worldview, one informed by the fantastic, the sentimental, and sometimes even the surreal. The creative artist here is Arthur Conan Doyle's father, an illustrator of some note, relegated to shamed shadows in family memory -- but why?The answer, at least as interpreted by the editor of this facsimile volume, is alcoholism. It's nothing so shameful now, of course; but to the Victorian world, it was a moral failing, rather than a physical/psychological disease. So the elder Doyle's life was shrouded in the vague diagnosis of "weakness," which was never quite spelled out in blunt terms. But setting that aside, we still have this remarkable sketchbook, filled with often hallucinatory imagery. Was all of it merely a result of a mind muddled by too much drinking? I don't think so. True, the pictures here are often unwittingly revealing of their creator's moods & mindscape -- sometimes you get the feeling Doyle was drawing what he saw in the throes of delirium tremens. Still, there's something more here -- a witty, bemused, amazed depiction of a world in which wonders mingle with the everyday, a world where barriers between the two are uncertain at best, shading into one another. One watercolor, for example, shows us a Victorian infant cradled in the arms of a huge brown-red squirrel. Doyle's caption? "Either this is a precious small Babe, or a monstrous big Squirrel." So we see Victorian fairies & infants in all their innocent sweetness, juxtaposed with a strange world of Nature, often garnished with symbolic figures of Death & Mystery. It's a disorienting world, where the sugary clichés of the era suddenly open into a capricious wonderland. And it's a reminder that beneath the most ordinary, even banal surface, something extraordinary may be lurking. Highly recommended!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Arthur Conan Doyle's Father, Charles A. Doyle...1889 Sketch Book,
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Thirty years ago a sketch book of jottings, notes and drawings by Charles A. Doyle was found. It is a journal of his day to day life in an insane asylum to prove he was not insane. The sketches are wonderful and stand alone as they depict the life of a man who is bewildered by his time in an asylum. Not much was ever known about Charles as an artist, even though his brother Richard "Dickie" Doyle was a successful Victorian illustrator.This is a book to enjoy over and over.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Doyle Diary,
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This review is from: The Doyle diary: The last great Conan Doyle mystery: With a Holmesian investigation into the strange and curious case of Charles Altamont Doyle (Hardcover)
The images leap off the page and you can see the influence of this wonderful art work in that of many of today's artists.
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