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Chapter 6

A Child of Reform

Vernon Lushington and his twin brother Godfrey were children of reform. They were born into a family of reformers on March 8, 1832, at 2 Great George Street, just a short distance from the old Palace of Westminster where, three months later, an Act was passed which transformed British politics forever by sweeping away the old “rotten boroughs”, creating new parliamentary constituencies that recognized and reflected the emerging industrial centers of the northern counties, and extending the franchise to nearly half a million more voters. The boys followed in their father’s footsteps and were committed to social, educational, and political reform throughout their lives.

The twins were the seventh and eighth of Stephen and Sarah Lushington’s children. They were so alike that even their closest friends found it difficult to tell them apart. A family story has it that, when at the Royal Opera House one night and confronted by his own reflection in a tall mirror at the turn of the great staircase, Vernon mistook it for his brother and exclaimed, “Hello Godfrey! I didn’t know I was to have the pleasure of seeing you here this evening.”¹ William Rossetti, who knew both brothers well, but still struggled to distinguish one from the other, found a novel way of avoiding any embarrassment. He wrote “However it happened that Vernon, who had been in the navy in his early youth, had by accident, lost a finger: and a surreptitious glance at his hand was a useful precaution against such a blundering.”² In fact, this did not happen in the navy, but on a shoot at West Horsley Place, Surrey, from which episode he was considered lucky to have escaped with his life.³

Both Maria Edgeworth and Joanna Baillie had remarked that none of the Lushington children were considered particularly attractive in their formative years [see page 31] and, when the twins were only a year old, their maternal grandmother wrote:

The dear children are as well as we can expect after Teething & a slight attack of Influenza. The babies are not in their full beauty, particularly Vernon, for you know how Sarah’s boys all fall back on weaning & when they first begin to cut their teeth.⁴

Following their mother’s death, the Lushington children were brought up under the watchful eye of Frances Carr (affectionately known as “Aunt Fanny”) who transferred the responsibilities of her earlier supervision of Ada Lovelace to her late sister’s family. Frances assumed the role of chatelaine of Stephen Lushington’s household at Ockham Park and remained a force to be reckoned with in the family until her death in 1880.⁵ She also nursed her brother-in-law during a debilitating illness in the 1850s and, later, when old age began to take its toll on him.

Cheam School

Vernon and Godfrey received their primary education at Cheam School, near Epsom, Surrey, a school that had been in existence for nearly two hundred years. The twins were considered bright pupils and, by the age of fourteen, they were “contributing excellent Latin elegiacs” as well as poetry, to the school journal.⁶ At Cheam, the boys were joined by their cousin Hugh Culling Eardley Childers, later First Lord of the Admiralty and then Chancellor of the Exchequer. There is a story that when the twins made their first visit to Cheam, one of them was hit on the head by a cricket ball and badly scarred.⁷

Cheam’s headmaster at this time was Charles Mayo, a man of advanced educational views who had traveled to Switzerland to gain first-hand experience of Johann Pestalozzi’s experimental school at Yverdun. This school had a similar ethos to that of another founded by the educationalist Emmanuel de Fellenberg, a man much admired by Lady Byron. Mayo was considered to be a great headmaster, “full of wit and power of conversation” and with “the gift of winning the affection of many devoted friends.”⁸ Mayo introduced the Pestalozzian method to Cheam when he took on the headship in 1826. His aim was that the school should provide a moral and religious educational foundation duly adapted to the principles of evangelical Christianity. However, whereas Pestalozzi sought to bring enlightenment to all, Mayo planned to start with an upper-class school and to spread the method to the masses from above. The school thrived under Mayo’s leadership and, by the early 1830s, there were between forty-five and fifty boys each of whom he made a point of knowing individually.

At Cheam, the Lushington boys experienced a regime that commenced with work and prayers from half-past six till eight o’clock interspersed with breaks and time for play and concluded with prayers at a quarter to eight. Corporal punishment was frowned upon and only permitted in special circumstances. Moreover, as a rule, punishments of all kinds were avoided. Instead, “timely advice and kind words” were considered preferable and ultimately more effective. Shortly before Mayo’s death in 1846, Henry Shepheard took over the headship. A good scholar and a man of upright character, he was, like his predecessor, a devout Christian of the rigorous sort.

In 1908, Susan Lushington, visiting Epsom, wrote to her father describing the place. He replied:

I quite agree with you as to the pretty old look of Epsom. I enjoy it every time I go there. But you, dear Sue, cannot have my primeval recollection of it—date about 1842 or 43 when my Father came there with Fanny & Alice & the horses, putting up at “Baker’s Coffeehouse” as it was called, & Godfrey & I came over from Cheam, dined with them, & walked back the next morning. It was September, for I remember the blackberries.⁹

However, Lushington’s memories of Cheam were not altogether happy and, faced with the prospect of being in the vicinity of his old school later his life, he recalled “Shepheard’s lank & gloomy vicarage” which produced:

a memory, which truly, is not full to me of pleasant recollections—the sight of those bricks & the 4 prison walls wd. I am sure it would be hateful to me now—For what a nursery system that was of ours—Codling puritanism; espionage, petty restrictions, incessant work & little play – my pride revolts even now as the bare thought of it all.¹⁰

A rare glimpse of Lushington’s boyhood is found in a letter written from Ockham Park by one of his siblings [probably Godfrey] to their sister Alice in 1846. The writer tells how he, together with Vernon, and their older brother William, had spent their holidays horse riding and in other activities on the estate:

Yesterday Vernon & I went out for a walk & bathed, but stopping to devour blackberries, were pressed for time. Accordingly, we made a dashing short cut over Mr Lambert’s carrot and potato field, broke through 3 nasty hedges, scaled the park wall, & ran home, just in time to wash our hands & go downstairs …Although the naval business is no longer a secret, for it is entirely settled, yet the little ones and the servants know nothing about it, in order that Papa may not hear it talked about. However, I imagine the subject does not vex him as it formerly did.¹¹

The Naval Cadet

The “naval business” that was “no longer a secret” refers to the next phase of Lushington’s life when, despite his father’s disapproval, he went to sea as a cadet in October 1846. Such action displayed an early sense of independency in the young Lushington that ran contrary to his usual respect for his father but, in writing to one of his daughters in 1899, he reflected:

This day 53 years ago I joined H.M.S. Eurydice. The more fool I probably; at any rate it is an instance of a boy persistently longing to be what he is totally unfitted for. Why my good Father allowed me to go I cannot think.¹²

An event that took place during Lushington’s time at sea demonstrated an inherent sense of justice and fair play that he retained throughout his life. The episode was recounted to the art historian William Gaunt by Susan Lushington when he stayed with her to research his pioneering book on the Pre-Raphaelites.

Beginning life as a midshipman he [Vernon] was incensed at the bullying then practised; and finding one of the officers engaged in roasting a midshipman (over a fire, as in Tom Brown’s Schooldays), knocked him down. This piece of insubordination deserved and received praise, but also a nominal reprimand; the upshot was that he left the navy and went to Cambridge to study law.¹³

In December 1849 Stephen Lushington, concerned by this incident, wrote:

my thoughts . . . have been wholly occupied with Vernon—Capt. Gambier will soon save him if indeed he will be saved but I cannot expect he will get off free. . . . Vernon I find is still under arrest tho’ Capt. G did all possible to get him released.¹⁴

Lushington’s discharge papers have not survived but a digest of the matter among official records reveals that the charges were considered to be, “frivolous, a subversion of the discipline of the Service.” He was punished by a loss of three months sea time; his offense being described as “misconduct” and he was eventually discharged from service on 13th December, 1849.¹⁵

A strong affinity with nautical life was retained by Lushington long after he left the navy and, when out on the popular Working Men’s College Sunday walks, he would greet any passing sailor with a nautical phrase.¹⁶ He was later to resume a connection with Britain’s “senior service” when, in 1871, he was appointed Secretary to the Admiralty, a post which he held for seven years. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, Lushington’s mind returned again to his time in the navy. He wrote, that the events of the war were “all so near too. Those who remember the year 1848 may have something of the same feeling, but I was a boy, in the Indian Seas.”¹⁷

Further Education

In March 1850, Lushington was placed under the care of the Reverend W. J. Conybeare at his Vicarage in Axminster, Devon, to be schooled for the next phase of his education. Conybeare, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, was a broad churchman and a noted contributor to the Edinburgh Review, an influential periodical that promoted Whig policies¹⁸ Although he undoubtedly helped nurture a more liberal theological outlook in the young Lushington, Conybeare would not have condoned his pupil’s later adoption of Positivism. In 1853, Conybeare wrote an article in the Review on Church Parties at the end of which he commented, “The highest ranks and most intelligent professionals are influenced by sceptical opinions, to an extent which, twenty years back, would have been deemed incredible.”¹⁹ Three years later, Conybeare wrote a novel called Perversion; or, The Causes and Consequences of Infidelity in which he placed Positivism between Unitarianism and Mormonism on a downward-leading path of sin and unbelief.

The East India Company College

Conybeare’s role was to prepare Lushington for the East India Company College at Haileybury, Hertfordshire. He supported his student’s application by confirming that, during the time he had known him, he had “conducted himself with perfect propriety; that he has been orderly in his behaviour, attentive to regulations, and most diligent in application to is studies.”²⁰ When Lushington entered the College, its principal was the Reverend Henry Melvill, a popular evangelical preacher whose sermons were said to lack simplicity and directness, appealing more to the literary than the spiritual sense.²¹ His tutor in Asian languages was Monier Monier-Williams, another evangelical who believed the conversion of India to the Christian religion to be one of the aims of oriental scholarship. A former pupil at the College recalled:

Haileybury was a happy place, though rather a farce as far as learning was concerned. In fact, you might learn as much or as little as you liked, but while the facilities for not learning were considerable, those for learning were, in practice, somewhat scanty.²²

Despite any distractions and temptations, Lushington gave himself to learning, thereby earning the high regard of the headmaster who, on his leaving, wrote to his father, “I cannot but express my regret at the loss wh[ich] our Coll[ege] will sustain on the retirement from its walls of one of its highest ornaments, of one so admirably qualified in every respect to be the Head of the College.”²³ Lushington excelled at Haileybury and won prizes in Classics, Law, History, and Political Economics, Sanskrit and Hindi as well as a General Proficiency Prize. He also contributed a humorous essay to the school magazine entitled “Stylo-philus Having Broken His Golden Pen, Indulgeth in the Following Stain”.²⁴

Edward Lear

Just as their father had gathered a circle of talented friends around him at Ockham Park, so did Lushington and his siblings. One of that circle was Edward Lear, now best remembered for his nonsense verse and art. Lear had a close friendship with Lushington’s cousin, Franklin, whom he had met in 1848 when the two were sailing from Malta to Greece. Despite their age difference, Lear developed a deep attachment to Franklin who almost certainly introduced Lear to his Ockham cousins. Lear’s friendship with the family at Ockham was principally with Vernon’s brother William who was closer to his age.

Lear made several visits to Ockham Park between 1860 and 1864. He described the house as “pleasant” and “old fashioned”.²⁵ The family were “always a model of kindness, order & simplicity—besides high culture & natural superior intellect.”²⁶ During his visits, Lear entertained the family by singing after dinner. He enjoyed exploring the surrounding countryside and, on one occasion, he walked with the Lushington twins to nearby Cobham to see the magnificent cedars of Lebanon in Painshill Park, which help provide inspiration for a painting he was considering.

Lear found Stephen Lushington to be “a most wonderfully fine cheerful good learned fine old man” but he considered that the twins “are rather bores.”²⁷ Lear’s opinion, probably due more to his own fits of depression and boredom which made him not always easy to get on with, contrasted with that of Charles Buxton who considered the twins to be, “delightful, so bright, genial, gentlemanly & enthusiastic.”²⁸

ELIZABETH Gaskell

In June 1862, Lear recorded in his journal that his fellow guests at Ockham were the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and two of her daughters. Gaskell shared the Lushington family’s passion for social duty and reform, so vividly expressed through her novels Mary Barton and North and South. It is possible that she may have had some distant kinship with the Lushingtons through her mother’s family, the Hollands, who had been neighbors of the Carrs (Stephen Lushington’s-in-laws) in Northumberland.²⁹

Lushington’s first recorded meeting with Gaskell was in 1853 when she wrote to her daughter Marianne that he had “brought his sister to tea last night, promiscuous,” that is, uninvited.³⁰ Despite such boldness, he soon won her affections, and by 1862, she confided to a friend, “Yes, I do like Mr Lushington very much; and it is a consequence of prejudice on my part; for when I first knew him he rubbed my fur (mentally speaking,) all the wrong way. But I do think it best to begin with a little aversion.”³¹

On a visit to London in 1860, Gaskell joined members of the Lushington family at one of the philanthropic concerts at the Working Men’s College.³² A later chance meeting with Lushington and his aunt Frances Carr resulted in Gaskell’s visit to Ockham Park. In 1862, Lushington joined forces with Gaskell in her campaign to assist the Manchester cotton workers who were suffering from of the blockade of raw material from the southern states of America, which resulted from the Civil War. Lushington collected funds from sympathetic friends in London, which he then forwarded to her in Manchester (see page 244).

The Gaskells’ family home was in Plymouth Grove, Manchester, and Lushington was always assured of a room there whenever his work took him to that city. After one visit, Meta Gaskell wrote to a friend that Lushington had “brought us such a capital account of our dear orphan girls.”³³ On another visit, the novelist took Lushington to see the new Assize Courts that were being built in Manchester.³⁴ She introduced him to the architect, Alfred Waterhouse, who told Lushington that he proposed to place the motto “Thou shalt not bear false witness” on the wall of the Crown Court. However, Lushington suggested that it would be “better to have the words of the venerable oath the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”—a suggestion that was taken up by Waterhouse.³⁵ Lushington wrote to his wife proclaiming:

I am a Goth, have you found that out?” He explained, ‘I greatly admire the new Assize Courts at Manchester . . . thro’ Mrs Gaskell I have made the acquaintance of the Architect, Mr Waterhouse, a very promising young man; & indeed he showed us all over the building, before it was complete.³⁶

There is a hint of a romance between Lushington and one of Gaskell’s daughters which led her mother to write, “Cousin V’s attentions to FE [Florence Emily]” were “very morbid.”³⁷ After his marriage to Jane Mowatt in 1865, Lushington wrote to his wife from Manchester to tell her that he had met Elizabeth’s husband William and some of the daughters including Florence Emily who, by then was married to Charles Crompton. Lushington wrote, “I ventured to tell her that I had married you—I felt sorry that I had given the Norman Cross to her.”³⁸ Whatever the “Norman Cross” was, or whatever it represented, it seems to have been considered a rather personal gift of the sort that might have indicated a close relationship.

Other visitors to Ockham Park when Lushington was still living at home were William Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, and William Holman Hunt. Lushington’s friendship with these and others in the Pre-Raphaelite circle will be considered in Chapter 12.

Unlike a number of Victorian offspring, Lushington retained a good relationship with his father who, with his liberal and latitudinarian views on religious matters, allowed his children a good measure of freedom in their early years that was not always found in families. His father’s beliefs and sympathies allowed his children to think unconventionally. Thus, it was that seeds were sown which prepared Lushington for his involvement with the Christian Socialists at Cambridge before he abandoned any lingering orthodox religious faith to take up the Positivism of Auguste Comte.

NOTES

1. From a letter to the author from John Montgomery-Massingberd dated July 16 1981. See also Montgmery-Massingberd's Happy Days at Gunby: A Musical Memoir (The National Trust, 1996).

2. William Michael Rossetti, Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti (C Scriber’s Sons, 1906), Vol. 1, p. 268.

3. Edward Lear wrote to William Holman Hunt in 1865, “but G[odfrey] & V[ernon] have grown up dreadfully alike that I can’t distinguish them a bit.” Augustus Hare, in his autobiography Peculiar People: The Story of My Life, wrote that the brothers were so alike that “it would have been impossible to know them apart, if Vernon had not, fortunately for their friends, shot off some of his fingers.” Sir Edward Clarke, in a paper to the Working Men’s College (1913), also noted that the brothers were “so much alike that if you met one of them you had to shake hands before you knew whether he was the brother who had lost his finger.” Jane Welsh Carlyle was another who commented on Vernon’s missing fingers. An undated letter from Emily Currie of West Horsley Place to Alice Lushington refers to this accident. She writes, “The keeper seems to say he had a very narrow escape, as had the Gun been leaning the other way it is almost impossible his head would not have escaped.” SHC7854/2/2/11.

4. Frances Carr to William and Anna Carr, May 1833. Carr family documents and letters, YUL, Box 2, Folder 9.

5. Frances Carr spent her last years at the Grange, Byfleet Road, Cobham. She is buried at Byfleet, Surrey.

6. Edward Peel, Cheam School From 1645 (Thornhill Press, 1974), p. 135.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Vernon Lushington to Susan Lushington, May 1890. SHC7854/11/3.

10. Vernon Lushington to Godfrey Lushington, September 21. n.y. SHC7854/12/24.

11. 17 August 1846. SHC7854/2/1/20.

12. Vernon Lushington to Susan Lushington, October 18, 1899. SHC 7854/4/2/98.

13. Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Dream, p. 70.

14. Stephen Lushington to Frances Lushington, December 7, 1849. SHC 7854/1/7/5. Captain Gambier was Robert Fitzgerald Gambier (1803–1885), son of Sir James Gambier. Robert Gambier married Stephen’s niece Hester Butler of Bury Lodge, Hambledon, Hampshire.

15. TNA ADM/508, Cut 34.23 and TNA ADM 196/36.

16. “Obituary of Vernon Lushington,” The Working Men’s College Journal XII, no. 223 (March 1912).

17. Vernon Lushington to Jane Lushington. SHC7854/3/7/27. Lushington’s naval record reveals that, in November 1847, he was engaged in an attack on the Arab defences in Mozambique.

18. Noel Annan refers to the Conybeare family in “The Intellectual Aristocracy,” pp. 243–86.

19. Edinburgh Review, October 1853, p. 342.

20. Letter from William Conybeare dated July 12 1850 filed with the Petition of Vernon Lushington to the Court of Directors of the East India Company. Records of the East India College, Haileybury. BL: Asian and African Studies.

21. One of Lushington’s contemporaries at Haileybury, with whom he retained a lifelong friendship, was William (later Sir William) Herschel, a grandson of the noted astronomer. Herschel’s father had been a friend of Joanna Baillie and probably knew Stephen and Sarah Lushington.

22. John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian, ed. C.H. Cooke (Chatto & Windus, 1961), p. 63.

23. 13 January 1852. SHC 7854/1/13.

24. The Haileybury Observer (1852), p. xii.

25. Edward Lear Diary, 15 July 1860. Houghton Library, Harvard Library, Harvard University. MS Eng 797.30.

26. Edward Lear Diary, October 1, 1864.

27. Edward Lear Diary, July 15, 1860.

28. Charles Buxton Diary, October 18, 1856. British Library Add MS 87175.

29. Elizabeth Gaskell to Catherine Winkworth, July 23, 1862. Chapple and Pollard, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell. For more on Gaskell and the Carrs see Chapple, Elizabeth Gaskell. The Early Years.

30. Elizabeth Gaskell to Marianne Gaskell, June 1853. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell.

31. Elizabeth Gaskell to Henry Arthur Bright, April 12, 1862. Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell, eds., John Chapple and Alan Shelston (Manchester Unversity Press, 2000.

32. Elizabeth Gaskell to George Smith, April 5, 1860. Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 162.

33. Meta Gaskell to Effie Wedgwood, November 7, 1862. Irene Wiltshire (ed.) Letters of Mrs Gaskell’s Daughters: 1856–1914 (HEB Humanities Ebooks, 2012).

34. A letter from Meta Gaskell to Charles Eliot Norton, January 30, [1867] refers to Waterhouse staying with the Gaskells at their house in Plymouth Road, Manchester.

35. The Manchester Assize Courts were partially destroyed by bombing in World War II and subsequently demolished.

36. Vernon Lushington to Jane Lushington, February 23, 1865. SHC7854/3/5/11.

37. Elizabeth Gaskell to Mariane Gaskell [May 1 and 2, 1862], Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 686.

38. Vernon Lushington to Jane Lushington, December 17, 1865. SHC 7854/3/5/2/23.