ABSTRACT
By the 1880s the family was growing up and dispersing, and Henry and Juliana wanted nothing more than a quiet life at Lyne. Both were in declining health, and Henry’s worsened considerably after an accident with a falling blind in September 1884, which left him with reduced sight and confined to a wheelchair.1 He had retired from the firm three years previously at the age of 70, leaving his 23-yearold son Harry as a newcomer on the factory floor, though he himself remained a partner and kept in touch with the London showroom and factory. The firm had benefited from a healthy injection of capital from Henry’s half-brother Thomas Broadwood Jr, who died in the same year, leaving £424,000.2
On the home front, the older members of the family were marrying and moving away. In 1881 Mary became the fourth daughter to marry, choosing the affable clergyman John Shearme, who had a living at the newly formed parish of Holmbury St Mary’s, near Dorking. They were married at Newdigate Church on 1 February by the Reverend Francis Holland of Canterbury, Mary’s cousin by marriage. A daughter, Mary Dorothea, was born in January 1883, and Lucy was invited to be her godmother and presented her with a coral necklace at her christening.3 Mary, previously robust and healthy, soon became ill, and the baby was chronically unwell.4 Edith had joined the ranks of the Anglo-Irish, having married the Irish landowner Robert Conway Dobbs; the couple’s two sons, William and Henry, were of school-age by the 1880s. A daughter, Alison Charity, was born in 1885 at a time when the spectre of Home Rule was agitating families like theirs, and they were greatly relieved when Gladstone’s bill was defeated.5 Evelyn, married to barrister William Forsyth, had a daughter, Jean, in September 1879 and a son, Hazeldean, shortly thereafter.6 Her husband, who had been working in India, returned in 1881. She and the family were living in Haslemere, where
she was a neighbour of Tennyson, the poet laureate, and his family; Lucy met the distinguished man after a local concert in November 1883 and subsequently in September 1884, forming an instant rapport. Evelyn, meanwhile, was preparing for publication an edition of a sixteenth-century Romance by Griffith Boan, Ye Gestes of Ye Lady Anne, illustrated by Anna Hennen Broadwood, the American wife of her uncle, Thomas Capel Broadwood, who had emigrated to New orleans in 1847. The book was published by Leadenhall Press, which specialized in producing high-quality books, exemplary for their illustration, printing and typography.7 Eventually, Evelyn took a flat in London, in Carlisle Mansions, Victoria.8
