Combining a breadth of scholarship, insightful critical thinking, and an engaging personal interaction with Mary Hallock Foote’s substantial collection of illustrations and writings, Megan Riley McGilchrist provides a significant contribution to western literature and the lives of western writers. 

Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote opens a window into the remarkable, little-known nineteenth-century personal history of accomplished American author and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote, a woman both of her time, and ahead of it. When Mary gave up a successful career as an illustrator in New York to follow her husband, a mining engineer, to the West, she found herself in a new, unfamiliar, and often challenging world—sometimes feeling like an exile. The thousands of pages of her unpublished letters, which form the foundation of this book, give rare insight into the process of acculturation and eventually the transformation that she experienced. This wide-ranging analysis also examines the role that nature and Mary’s lifelong connection with the natural world played in her adaptation to the western mining towns where she spent much of the rest of her life. 

In many ways, Mary’s life mirrored that of author Megan Riley McGilchrist, whose parallel exile began in 1977 when she left America for England. Drawing equivalences with Mary’s life as an exile and her own life as an expatriate American woman, Megan provides a meditation on her own transformation, as much as on Mary’s. Megan demonstrates what it has been like to be a twenty-first-century American expatriate, Californian-turned-Londoner—to find common ground in the life of a nineteenth-century woman.

Comprising elements of biography, literary analysis, history, and personal history, and containing many unpublished excerpts from Mary’s voluminous correspondence, Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote offers insight into the ways Mary perceived the world around her. It also provides insight into the experiences of exiles of any time—people who have left a familiar environment to embark on a new life in a new and not necessarily comfortable setting.

Before he joined the staff of Punch and designed its iconic front cover, illustrator Richard “Dicky” Doyle was a young man whose father (political caricaturist John Doyle) charged him with sending a weekly letter, even though they lived under the same roof. This volume collects the fifty-three illustrated missives in their entirety for the first time and provides an uncommon peek into the intimate but expansive observations of a precocious social commentator and artist.

In a series of vivid manuscript canvases, Doyle observes Victorian customs and society. He visits operas, plays, and parades. He watches the queen visiting the House of Commons and witnesses the state funeral of the Duke of Sussex. He is caught up in the Chartist riots of August 1842 and is robbed during one of the melees. And he provides countless illustrations of ordinary people strolling in the streets and swarming the parks and picture galleries of the metropolis. The sketches offer a fresh perspective on major social and cultural events of London during the early 1840s by a keen observer not yet twenty years old.

Doyle’s epistles anticipate the modern comic strip and the graphic novel, especially in their experimentation with sequential narrative and their ingenious use of space. The letters are accompanied by a full biographical and critical introduction with new material about Doyle’s life.