Talk:Alexander Meyrick Broadley

His Reputation

Broadley appears to have been quite a piece of work whose notorious reputation in the press, had been forgotten by the time of his death. In 1916 Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen wrote of him in the Chicago Tribune - after running through his personal history: "Of course all this is old and forgotten, and if I recall it, it is merely merely in order to show show how very unreliable obituaries are apt to be, and the facility with which even such men as Broadley, if possessed of sufficient cleverness, and of impudence, are able to blind their citizens to their past infamies and to die in the odor of respectability, if not of sanctity" Engleham (talk) 17:04, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

The following Wildean paragraph that appeared in a syndicated column after Broadley was run out of England after Cleveland St is extraordinary, not just in its campness, but in making light of the Indian scandal, and is surely worth inclusion in some form. The play on doubleness makes me wonder whether Wilde may have read it in a London newspaper. "I hear that a once well-known figure in London society, Mr Broadley, formally connected with a society journal, and familiar to his friends as "Broadley Pasha", has "renewed his youth" at Brussels, to which he retired with a competence a couple of years ago. Mr Broadley, who still interests himself in journalism in his new home, is in the widest sense "a new man". He in fact insists that he is a disconnected and differentMr Broadley altogether from the gentleman whose adventures while in the service of the Indian Prison department finally excited so much curiosity in London; denies that there was ever such a person as himself, that his portrait ever appeared in Vanity Fair, or that an exalted personage ever intervened fiercely in his affairs. The English colony in Brussels is now divided into two contending camps. One section insists that Mr Broadley is the Mr Broadley, and therefore impossible and insufferable. The other protests that their Mr Broadley, who it appears enjoys the friendship and esteem of the King of the Belgians, is fitted to grace any society in which he may find himself." ("Vanity Fair" by J.M.D., "The Argus" (Melbourne, Australia), Saturday 19 March 1892, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/840746) Engleham (talk) 12:03, 21 February 2016 (UTC)