Vernon Lushington QC

QC

In Commonwealth countries, QC refers to Queen's Counsel, a distinguished and experienced legal practitioner.QC may also refer to:* Quebec Canada Post provincial abbreviation...

, (8 March 1832 – 24 Jan 1912), was a Positivist, Deputy Judge Advocate General, Second Secretary to the Admiralty

Second Secretary to the Admiralty

The office of Second Secretary to the Admiralty was a former government position in the Admiralty of Great Britain and later of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Assistants to the Secretary of the Admiralty were initially only intermittently appointed, being sometimes designated...

, and was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...

.

Lushington was born in Westminster

Westminster

Westminster is an area of central London, within the City of Westminster, England. It lies on the north bank of the River Thames, southwest of the City of London and southwest of Charing Cross...

, London, to Stephen

Stephen Lushington (judge)

Stephen Lushington was a Doctor of Civil Law, a judge, a Member of Parliament and a radical for the abolition of slavery and capital punishment.-Early life and education:...

 and Sarah Grace (née Carr) Lushington; his twin brother was Godfrey Lushington

Godfrey Lushington

Sir Godfrey Lushington KCB, GCMG, , British civil servant and promoter of prison reform, was Permanent Under-Secretary of State of the Home Office of the United Kingdom from 1886 to 1895....

, KCB

Order of the Bath

The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry founded by George I on 18 May 1725. The name derives from the elaborate mediæval ceremony for creating a knight, which involved bathing as one of its elements. The knights so created were known as Knights of the Bath...

 GCMG, Permanent Under-Secretary of State of the Home Office. He was educated at East India College, Haileybury

Haileybury

Haileybury may refer to:* Haileybury, Ontario, part of Temiskaming Shores, a city in Ontario* Haileybury and Imperial Service College, a coeducational English public school in Hertfordshire...

, Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...

, and Trinity College

Trinity College, Oxford

The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in the University of Oxford, of the foundation of Sir Thomas Pope , or Trinity College for short, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It stands on Broad Street, next door to Balliol College and Blackwells bookshop,...

 Oxford

Oxford

The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...

. He became a QC, a county court judge

Judge

A judge is a person who presides over court proceedings, either alone or as part of a panel of judges. The powers, functions, method of appointment, discipline, and training of judges vary widely across different jurisdictions. The judge is supposed to conduct the trial impartially and in an open...

, Secretary to the Admiralty in 1871, and Deputy Judge Advocate General from 1878 to 1912. He married Jane Mowatt, daughter of Francis Mowatt, on 28 February 1865.

With his brother Godfrey, he advocated positivist philosophy, motivated by the ideas of Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...

, and was a follower of Frederic Harrison

Frederic Harrison

Frederic Harrison was a British jurist and historian.Born at 17 Euston Square, London, he was the son of Frederick Harrison, a stockbroker and his wife Jane, daughter of Alexander Brice, a Belfast granite merchant. He was baptised at St...

. Influenced by Frederick Denison Maurice, he joined the Working Men's College

Working Men's College

The Working Men's College- WMC, being among the earliest adult education institutions established in the United Kingdom, is Europe's oldest extant centre for adult education and perhaps one of its smallest...

 as a singing teacher, and promoter of art and music appreciation; he became part of the group that formed the first College governing Corporation in 1854. At the death of Maurice in 1872, he, with his brother, and Frederick James Furnivall

Frederick James Furnivall

Frederick James Furnivall , one of the co-creators of the Oxford English Dictionary , was an English philologist...

, Thomas Hughes

Thomas Hughes

Thomas Hughes was an English lawyer and author. He is most famous for his novel Tom Brown's Schooldays , a semi-autobiographical work set at Rugby School, which Hughes had attended. It had a lesser-known sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford .- Biography :Hughes was the second son of John Hughes, editor of...

, and Richard Buckley Litchfield

Richard Buckley Litchfield

Richard Buckley Litchfield was a British scholar and philanthropist.-Life:R. B. Litchfield was the only son of Captain Richard Litchfield of Cheltenham, England. He was educated at Cheltenham College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a friend of James Clerk Maxwell, and where he then...

, became a unifying force at the College.

He was a friend to artists, authors and activists, particularly those of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts Movement

Arts and Crafts movement

Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...

 who gravitated to the Working Men's College. In 1856, it was he who first introduced Edward Burne-Jones

Edward Burne-Jones

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...

 to Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

 in his College rooms. Rossetti used Lushington’s wife, Jane, as a model in 1865.

Lushington, friend of William Morris

William Morris

William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...

, was a frequent visitor to Kelmscott Manor

Kelmscott Manor

Kelmscott Manor is a handsome limestone manor house in the Cotswold village of Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, England. It is situated close to the River Thames, and it is frequently flooded. It dates from around 1570, with a late 17th-century wing...

. He was a close friend of Leslie Stephen

Leslie Stephen

Sir Leslie Stephen, KCB was an English author, critic and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.-Life:...

 and his family; Stephen’s daughter Virginia

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

 (later Woolf) based her character Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels....

 on Lushington’s daughter Kitty. He was also a close friend of Working Men’s College founder Richard Buckley Litchfield and his wife Etty

Etty Darwin

Henrietta Emma "Etty" Darwin, was a daughter of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma Wedgwood.Etty was born in Down House, Downe in 1843. She was Darwin's third daughter and the eldest daughter to reach adulthood after the eldest Annie died aged 10, and second daughter Mary died before becoming a...

, daughter of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

; the Lushington’s were regular visitors to Darwin’s Down House

Down House

Down House is the former home of the English naturalist Charles Darwin and his family. It was in this house and garden that Darwin worked on his theories of evolution by natural selection which he had conceived in London before moving to Downe....

. As Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...

’s friend, he edited Carlyle’s first Collected Works, (Chapman and Hall, 1858).