Mrs Henry Pickering
(1824-1907)
3 July 1862

Volume 8, page 170, sitting number 10,302.

[Identified as ‘Mrs Henry Pickering’ in the Silvy daybooks, the following sitter is identified as ‘Mrs Arthur Pickering.’ The two women are probably the wives of brothers Reverend James Henry Pickering and Arthur Proctor Pickering. Numerous contemporary sources attest to the fact that Reverend Pickering was generally known by his middle name rather than by his first name. The gentleman himself had visited Silvy’s studio the previous month (sitting number 8977), when he was identified in the daybooks as ‘Rev. H. Pickering.’]

Born in Marylebone on 22 January 1824, Marianne March was the daughter of merchant Thomas March and his wife Mary Anne née Gonne.

On 17 October 1850 at St John the Evangelist in Paddington she married Reverend James Henry Pickering, son of solicitor Edward Rowland Pickering. The groom had been appointed the Vicar of Overton with Shipton in Yorkshire the previous year.

The couple appear on the 1851 census living at the Vicarage in Shipton. Also present on the night of the census were Mrs Pickering’s sister, a housekeeper and a cook.

When the census was taken in 1871 the couple were still living at the Vicarage in Shipton. The household included two teenage sons, a ten-year-old ward named Lucy Caroline Dale and four servants. The ward Lucy was later known by various names. As Lucille Yseult Dudley she shot and wounded the Fenian leader Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa in New York on 2 February 1885. Some years previously she had attempted to commit suicide with chloroform in a railway carriage (Yorkshire Gazette, 5 February 1885).

By 1881 Henry had become the Rector of West Chittington in Sussex and was living at the Rectory there. On the night of the census Marianne was visiting the family of Colonel the Hon. William Le Poer Trench at 3 Hyde Park Gardens, Paddington.

When the census was taken in 1891 Henry and Marianne were boarding at a house in Torquay, though Henry still gave ‘Rector of West Chittington’ as his profession.

Reverend James Henry Pickering died, aged 83, at 5 Sloane Court, Lower Sloane Street, Chelsea, on 12 October 1899, leaving an estate valued at £5250. Probate was granted to his widow Marianne.

Mrs Marianne Pickering died, aged 82, at the same address on 15 January 1907. Her estate was valued at £15,274.