The Remarkable Lushington Family. David TaylorЧитать онлайн книгу.
Reference, Volume 32. Duke University Press
It was his distinguishing trait that he always saw the best in people, and they were thus led to be at their best in his company.
—Henrietta Litchfield, from The Working Men’s College Journal, Vol. XII, No. 223 March 1912, p. 271
Introduction
One evening, early in 1856, in a smoke-filled room in Doctors’ Commons, a center for lawyers close to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, an encounter took place that was set to mark a seminal point in the history of nineteenth-century British art. The encounter was that of the young Oxford undergraduate Edward Burne-Jones and the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This introduction of the young student and the older, charismatic, and rebellious painter and poet was later hailed as the “second beginning of Pre-Raphaelitism, not to be confused with the first.”1 The person responsible for the meeting was Vernon Lushington.
Burne-Jones was at Exeter College, Oxford and had already met William Morris. Both had entered the university with the idea of taking holy orders and entering the Anglican ministry. However, a shared interest in art soon took over and began to erode earlier ambitions. They discovered the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and, in particular, that of Rossetti. Burne-Jones longed to make contact with Rossetti and so set out for London in the hope of seeing his idol.
Vernon Lushington. © Surrey History Centre.
After eventually finding his way to the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street, London, where Rossetti was a volunteer art teacher, Burne-Jones entered a room crowded with staff and College supporters, but Rossetti was nowhere to be seen. He explained his mission to one of the volunteer tutors who introduced him to “a kindly-looking man” who knew Rossetti but who expressed some doubt that the artist, usually bored by such gatherings, would appear that evening. The “kindly-looking man” was Vernon Lushington. Despite all doubts, Rossetti did appear and was pointed out to Burne-Jones who saw “him for the first time, his face satisfying all my worship.” However, in the presence of his idol, the young acolyte was suddenly overcome by shyness and, losing his nerve, felt unable to approach the object of his pilgrimage.
Sensitive to Burne-Jones’s feelings, Lushington invited him come to his rooms in Doctors’ Commons a few nights later, where Rossetti was expected to attend an informal gathering of friends. He later recalled how it was that on evening he had his “first fearful meeting talk” with Rossetti. The result was that he abandoned any academic aspirations he might have had, or any thoughts of entering the church, and, instead, became a painter. Burne-Jones later introduced Rossetti to William Morris who also gave up any thought of entering the church and was subsequently brought into the wider circle of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
This simple act of hospitality, to which we shall return, was typical of Lushington and earned him eternal thanks from Burne-Jones who later wrote, “my first introduction to Gabriel was your doing—and big results it brought into my life.” The art historian William Gaunt summed up the episode when he wrote “in 1856, Oxford and Pre-Raphaelitism met—in Vernon Lushington’s rooms.”2
Lushington possessed a natural talent for friendship and a skill of bringing people together that enabled him throughout the rest of his life to network within, and across, a variety of cultural and intellectual circles as he followed in his father’s footsteps, championing reform and social concern wherever he could.
NOTES
1. William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Dream (Re-Print Society By Arrangement with Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1943), p. 92.
2. Ibid., p. 96.
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