Excerpts from a reproduction of Charles Altamont Doyle's sketchbook diaries, I recently picked up for three clams at the Salvation Army store. The Father of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles was admitted to a nursing home and asylums late in life with depression. In Charles own words:
"Keep steadily in view that this book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a MADMAN. Whereabouts would you say was the deficiency of Intellect? Of Depraved taste? If in the whole book you can find a single evidence of either, mark it and record it against me."
Written in 1889 in the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum, the ailing and epileptic Doyle would spend his last years institutionalised, passing away in 1893. His sketchbook diary was long forgotten by the family and eventually auctioned off amongst a job lot of books in 1955. From there it was stored in a child's playroom for twenty years before being discovered and reprinted as a hardcover reproduction in 1978.
The Diaries are filled with line drawings in the vein of Punch Magazine and beautiful watercolours depicting fairies, children and surreal environments that bring to mind the work of Henry Darger. Quips and puns line the pages and add to the sense of mystery about a man history has largely forgotten.
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