The Remarkable Lushington Family. David Taylor

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