PARKES, FANNY AND Nellie took the new route back home, via the transcontinental railroad crossing the United States. It was now the quickest way back to Europe and also enabled him to gain an impression of the nation that was emerging as Britain's principal rival in east Asia, with France out for the count following its catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

It sounds as if Parkes was actually able to relax on the voyage across the Pacific, a friend writing that ‘he was cheerful and bright’, and ‘in fair weather or fog, he was always delighted to play a game at deck-quoits or bull-board, throwing his whole heart into it with the warm enthusiasm and merry laughter of a schoolboy’. The Parkes trio docked in Liverpool on 9 August, and they travelled to Iford, near Lewes in Sussex, where the whole family stayed in the rectory which belonged to Fanny's uncle. The restless Parkes then took them to Bridge of Allan where he was able to indulge his love of hill climbing. They spent the autumn in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, and then moved to a house in London: 1 Lancaster Gate, near Paddington station, now the Corus Hotel Hyde Park. The area had been developed between 1860 and 1870 and was described in 1878 as a ‘splendid new city of palaces’. It was typical of the new, fashionable houses that he would choose when they were in England.

They were to have an eventful stay there. Harry gave them a scare, going down with scarlet fever, and on 28 April 1872 a fourth daughter, christened Lillian Hope, was born. Just six weeks after the birth of Lillian, on 14 June, the Parkes family lost Nellie to diphtheria. Such a close sequence of birth and death was, of course, not so unusual at the time, but it seems that nothing was ever really the same for the Parkes family after that, certainly not for Fanny. Dickins tells us that ‘the shock was a terrible one; she never quite rallied from it; but the shadow that thenceforth hung over her life, … paled all her joy’.