Mrs Carlyle

**Mrs Carlyle** is a character from *Lockwood & Co.* On the Netflix TV series, Mrs. Carlyle is portrayed by Sandra Huggett.

## Profile

Mrs Carlyle is the mother of Lucy Carlyle and her six siblings, including Mary. She is described as being weary from years of work and mainly left raising of Lucy to her siblings. Lucy states her to be large, pink and harassed-looking.

## History

Mrs. Carlyle spent her days working as a washer-woman, washing sheets nine hours a day mostly by hand. When not at work, she was raising her seven children, the last of these being Lucy Carlyle, though she mostly left the raising of her last daughter to her other children. Her husband regularly drank and died after falling under a train when Lucy was five years old. Her arms were extremely strong from her work and she employed corporal punishment upon her daughters if they misbehaved.

Mrs Carlyle recognized her daughter Lucy's Talent for sight from an early age, having possessed Talent herself in her youth. After Lucy saw a ghost at an early age, Mrs Carlyle brought her to the local agency, Jacobs and Co., when she was eight-years-old, the minimum age to become an apprentice agent. Everyone seemed to find the arrangement satisfactory and Lucy soon became the family's primary breadwinner, pulling in more money as an agent that Mrs Carlyle ever had washing sheets.

When most of Lucy's fellow agents died in an incident at a mill, Mrs Carlyle expected Lucy to resume her work there following a period of rest. Lucy instead ran away to London and joined the Lockwood & Co. agency. After some time on the job and a number of successful cases, she returned for a visit home. Her mother did not seem to resent her for having run away, but was true to her personality, remaining rather uncaring.

## Notes

In the Netflix *Lockwood & Co.* TV series, Mrs Carlyle's personality is rather different from that as described in the novels. Although in the novels Mrs Carlyle is described as being rather cold and uncaring due to work and weariness, in the TV series she is depicted as actively cruel to Lucy. She forces Lucy into getting a job with the Jacobs & Co. Agency, whereas in the novels there is nothing to suggest that Lucy did not want to work as an agent. Lucy is apparently her only child and she states that Lucy's father drank himself to death, leaving them with nothing, this more-or-less also being true of her father in the novels.

In the TV series, following the incident at the Mill, Lucy refuses to go back to work for Agent Jacobs, cursing the way he lied about the incident. Her mother insists that she will go back to work and Lucy again refuses, telling her that she never loved her, that she is incapable of it, deader than dead. Her mother slaps her, telling her that Jacobs is expecting them in the morning. She then runs away. In the novels, Lucy states only that it was expected that she would happily rejoin Jacobs, but after resting three days to regain her strength, she packed her rucksack, strapped on her rapier and left. In the novels, Lucy revisits her mother and family in a later novel, but ends her trip early due to no longer having much in common with them. In the television series, Lucy finds herself in hospital after her first case with Lockwood. The nurse mentions having called her mother and she asks worriedly if she told her where she was, but she replies that she didn't ask, that she sounded rather busy.