Richard Doyle is well known for his book illustrations of everyday life and fairy subjects. In 1843 he joined the staff of Punch, for which he designed the famous cover in 1849. He created fairyland illustrations for many stories including Ruskin's The King of the Golden River and Thackeray's The Newcomes, Leigh Hunt's Pot of Honey and William Allingham's In Fairy Land.

In Fairy Land, published by Longman Green and Company in 1870, must be considered Richard Doyle's masterpiece, and it reveals his secret fairy world at its most enchanting. It was a particularly enjoyable commission, for he was given a free hand by the publishers, and as a result produced some of his most imaginative pictures. William Allingham the poet was given the difficult task of fitting a verse framework to the plates. The book owed its success to the superb production standards set by its printer Edmund Evans, who adapted and surpassed the colour printing technique introduced by George Baxter to make it one of the Masterpieces of Victorian book production.
A favourite subject for Doyle's paintings was the violence associated with elves and puckish gnomes, it was probably this sadistic element in fairyland, which had attracted many Victorians to the fairy legends and their paintings. Doyle took great care with the first preliminary pencil and ink drawings, experimenting with various poses and fairy antics. He turned some of these into watercolours as he had done with previous poetry illustrations. The technique allowed him to study colour as well as tonal contrasts which he knew to be essential when working for wood engraving.