6 “My Life For Others”

A Nineteenth-Century Teacher: John Henry Bridges. With a Preface by Professor L.T. Hobhouse and an Introduction by Professor Patrick Geddes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1926), p. 191.

3 Lushington, Women, 8 June 1879. Manuscript in my possession.

4 Frederic Harrison, “Centres of Spiritual Activity No. II, The Positivist Society – Newton Hall” in Pall Mall Gazette (29 November 1883, quoted in Autobiographic Memoirs (London: Macmillan, 1911), Vol. 2, p. 264.

5 Lushington to H.G. Seeley. Vernon Lushington Letters, American Philosophical Society, call number B L97, 11 April 1862. Carlyle had written “It is better for a man to work out his God given faculty than merely speak it out.”

6 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists. Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930 (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1991), Chapter 1.

7 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: Chapman & Hall, 1858) p. 119.

8 David Shillan, The Order of Mankind as seen by Auguste Comte (New Atlantis Foundation, 1963), p.6.

9 Trinity College, Cambridge, Add.MS.d.70. See also Dixon (2008) p. 77.

10 G. Sutherland, Faith, Duty, and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and Their Circle, 1820-1960 (CUP, 2006).

11 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship, (London, 1926, reprinted CUP, 1979), p. 143.

12 J.L. & Barbara Hammond, The Bleak Age (Pelican Books, 1947), p. 123.

13 Lushington certainly knew and appreciated the benefits of “Fellowship”. At Cambridge he had been part of The Set, The Cambridge Union and The Apostles. He then went on to more specific groupings such as the Christian Socialists, the Working Men’s College, as well as several clubs including The Century Club and The Athenaeum.

14 Lushington, The State. Original manuscript in my possession.

15 Torban Christensen, in the preface to his history of the early Christian Socialist movement, noted that a full, detailed, study of the movement in the years 1848-54 will never be written. Despite Ludlow’s careful retention of all the correspondence and papers in connection with the work of Christian Socialism, and their later deposit in the Working Men’s College, they were all disposed of as waste paper by a secretary of the College who did not realise what he was doing.

16 The Macmillans had first opened a shop at 57 Aldersgate Street in 1843. A few months later they opened a shop at 17 Trinity Street, Cambridge and, in 1845, they moved to 1 Trinity Street. The Cambridge shop quickly became a meeting place for Christian Socialist sympathisers. After Daniel’s death in 1857, Alexander opened a branch at 23 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. Here, each Thursday, he held what were called the “tobacco parliaments” – gatherings of writers, scientists and artists such as Tennyson, Thomas Hughes, T.H. Huxley, and Herbert Spencer. In his diaries A.J. Munby notes Lushington’s attendances at many of these meetings.

17 The Reverend Julius Hare was a classics tutor at Cambridge. He was a world authority on Plato and also one of England’s leading German scholars. He later wrote a scholarly biography of John Sterling which was later eclipsed by Carlyle’s more famous work on the life of Sterling.

18 George John Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859-1907: No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2003).

19 When Alexander Macmillan’s son George published a Brief Memoir of Alexander Macmillan in 1908 the epithets included the following from Vernon Lushington, “Pray allow me as an old friend of your father to express the esteem and affectionate regard in which I held him, and my gratitude for his kindness and ever cordial greetings.”

20 Kingsley to John Martineau, 9 November 1854. Reproduced in Martineau, p. 22.

21 The Christian Socialist: A Journal of Association, No. 1, Vol. 1, November, 1850, p.1.

22 Ibid.

23 Comte, A General View of Positivism (1880), p. 203.

24 F.D. Maurice to Miss Williams Wynn, 29 July 1868 in Frederick Maurice, ed. The Life and Letters of Frederick Denison Maurice, (Macmillan and Co., 1885), p.578.

25 N.C. Masterman, John Malcolm Ludlow: The Builder of Christian Socialism (Cambridge, 1963), p.188.

26 Cambridge University Library, Add 7348/11.

27 Lushington to Richard Monkton Miles, Lord Houghton. 12 October 1862. Trinity College Library, Cambridge. Houghton 15/113-4.

28 Martha Vogeler to David Taylor in correspondence, “I consider the WMC a kind of model for the Positivists centres set up by Comte and his followers in the late 1860s and especially Newton Hall in 1880.” Comte advocated clubs for working men which would “form a substitute for the Church of old times, or rather prepare the way for the religious building of the new form of worship, the worship of Humanity.” Comte, A General View of Positivism (1880), p. 106.

29 There was a Working Men’s College in Cambridge in 1855 but it did not last. Others were set up in Oxford, Manchester, Ancoats, Halifax, Birkenhead and Glasgow among other places.

30 Mrs Andrew Crosse Science and Society in the Fifties from The Living Age, Vol 191, Issue 2469, 24 October 1891.

31 Lushington to Joanna Richardson. NLS MS 3990 ff 177-180. Undated by Lushington but a later hand has pencilled on this letter “Advent 1854”.

32 Derek Hudson, Munby Man of Two Worlds, The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby 1828-1910 (John Murray, 1972), p. 26.

33 Colloms, p. 180.

34 A.J. Munby, Diary, 8 November 1860. Trinity College, Cambridge.

35 Ibid. 22 November 1862.

36 Ibid. 28 May 1863.

37 Ibid. 29 November 1862.

38 Lushington to Furnivall (undated). The Huntington Library, California. FU 521-27.

39 MacDonald's Appreciation of Lushington in the Working Men’s College Journal, Vol. XII, No. 227, July 1912, p. 375. Mill described Positivism as “the most consistent system of spiritual and temporal despotism which ever yet emanated from a human brain, unless possibly that of Ignatius Loyola.” See Dixon p. 71.

40 Thomas Hughes, Early Memories For The Children (T. Burleigh, 1899), pp. 62-64.

41 Brenda Colloms, Victorian Visionaries, (Constable 1982), p. 171.

42 Lushington to Furnivall, 20 July 1858. The Huntington Library, California. FU 521-27.

43 Munby, 1869.

44 Ibid. 7 January 1870.

45 The Positivist Review.

46 Lushington joined Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes and hundreds of others at Maurice’s funeral service which was led by Llewelyn Davies and Dean Stanley. The Working Men’s College pp. 31-33.

47 Lushington took silk in 1868 and the following year he became a “Bencher”. In 1877 he was appointed a County Court Judge a position which he held until 1900.

48 Sidney & Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (Reprinted) (Augustus M. Kelley, New York 1965), Chapter 5, p. 247.

49 Lushington to Seeley. Vernon Lushington Letters, American Philosophical Society, call number B L97, 8 August 1861.

50 26 August 1868, Vernon to Jane Lushington from Liverpool: “I have just written a long letter to Harrison about my Trade Union paper. How I wish it was done, how I long to do it & get it done. It will haunt me even in Switzerland. I can’t explain to you what a long, difficult business it is, something like writing the history of England.”

51 A. W. Humphrey, Robert Applegarth. Trade Unionist Reformer, (Manchester: Net Labour Press, 1913), p. 40.

52 Masterman, pp. 186-7.

53 A Positivist Primer p. 111.

54 Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861-1881 (Aldershot: Gregg Revivals 1994), p. 305.

55 J. Llewellyn Davies (ed.), The Working Men’s College, 1854 – 1904. Records of its History and its Work for Fifty Years, By Members of the College (Macmillan & Co. Ltd. 1904) pp. 95-97.

56 There has been some uncertainty as to the date of the published letters but this can now be confirmed by a letter which Lushington wrote from Liverpool to H.G. Seeley. In this Lushington writes, “I have been here off & on for the last three weeks on Assize business. I have had great pleasure in bettering my acquaintance with Mrs Gaskell (authoress of Mary Barton) & her family. I have spent three Sundays with them, & I think of going for a fourth.” Vernon Lushington Letters, American Philosophical Society, call number B L97, 11 April 1862.

57 In 1853 Elizabeth Gaskell had written to her daughter Marianne “Mr Vernon Lushington brought his sister Alice to tea last night, promiscuous, i.e. uninvited.” In 1861 Mrs Gaskell, in a letter to Catherine Winkworth, mentions that she had met Vernon Lushington at a concert at Exeter Hall and he introduced her to his aunt “Miss Carr, well known to my Aunts in other days, when Hollands & Carrs were near neighbours.” Vernon’s aunt invited Mrs Gaskell to visit the family at Ockham but it is not known whether this invitation was taken up.

58 Vernon to Jane Lushington. Thursday, 23 February 1865. SHC 7857/Box3/1.

59 In 1866, after Mrs Gaskell’s death, her daughter Meta wrote to Alice Lushington, “I always think of you as one whom Mama valued and regarded most truly and affectionately.” Letter in my possession. The Lushington archive contains a number of other letters from Mrs Gaskell’s daughters to members of the Lushington family.

60 Alfred Waterhouse, A Chapter in the History of Strikes: Being a Letter to Vernon Lushington, Esq., Barrister-at-Law (Manchester, 1865).

61 Ibid. pp. 21-22.

62 Jose Harris, “Charles Booth”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

63 Ibid.

64 Matthew Arnold, “The Nadir of Liberalism”, The Nineteenth Century, vol. xix May 1886.

65 Bernard Bergonzi in A Victorian Wanderer. The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (Oxford University Press, 2003) neatly summarizes Arnold’s faith, or lack of it, as follows. “It is not easy to know what Matthew Arnold really believed, but anguish over the retreat of traditional faith is powerfully expressed in ‘Dover Beach’; he came to think that the poetry of religion should be preserved and its theological doctrines surrendered, whilst maintaining the Church of England as an essential pillar of state; it was desirable to go to church, but it not matter very much what you believed when you got there.” This could well be said of Lushington although his church attendance was less regular than that of Arnold’s.

66 Vogeler p. 116.

67 Lushington The State, 14 April 1889. Manuscript in my possession.

68 Ibid.

69 Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism. Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain, (The British Academy 2008), p. 215.

70 Vernon to Jane Lushington , 27 August 1870. SHC 7854/Box 3/7.

71 Vernon to Jane Lushington , 6 September 1870. SHC 7854/Box3/7.

72 Vernon to Jane Lushington, 7 September 1870. SHC7854/Box3/7.

73 Vernon to Jane Lushington, 7 October 1870. SHC7854/Box3/7.

74 Vernon to Jane Lushington, 4 October 1871. SHC7854/Box3/7.

75 Queen Victoria to Lord Salisbury, 9 September 1899. Quoted in Robert Tombs, ‘Lesser Breeds without the Law: The British Establishment and the Dreyfus Affair, 1894-1899’ in The Historical Journal, 41, 2, 1998.

76 The claim for this being the longest letter is in The Times 14 January 1985. Godfrey also wrote on the Dreyfus affair in the National Review. See Vogeler p. 235.

77 Vernon to Susan Lushington, 15 September 1899 “I have signed the Chronicle’s Address to Mme Dreyfus. Some of you might sign it too. Perhaps you noticed that it was altered ‘in response to the suggestion of a distinguished public man’ – I was not that individual. SHC 7854/Box11/2

78 In 1885 the London Positivist Committee had heavily criticised colonial expansion. “The story of the constant wars and the perpetual pressure by which the Empire is extended in all parts of the earth is one which in our eyes adds neither honour nor security to our nation. The cause of true civilisation gains neither at home not in the scene of these new acquisitions. The native races are crushed or demoralised, our rivals are perpetually irritated, and our home civilisation is disturbed by a system of aggrandisement which is justified by no superior morality, and which stimulates amongst ourselves the pride and the desire of wealth.” Newton Hall, London Positivist Committee, Report for the Year 1885 p. 9. (Musée la Maison d’Auguste Comte, Paris).

79 Harrison, “England and the Transvaal”, The Positivist Review, 1 September 1899. Malcolm Quinn, who then led the Church of Humanity in Newcastle on Tyne, also wrote and published an essay on “England and the Transvaal”, 29 September 1899. In a postscript to this tract, Quin denounced British action as “one of the most shameless wars in which a great nation has ever engaged.” (Musée la Maison d’Auguste Comte, Paris).

80 Vernon to Susan Lushington, 16 February 1900. SHC 7854/Box11/3.

81 Vernon to Kitty Lushington, 4 October SHC 7854 (no year – but written on a visit to William Morris at Kelmscott Manor). In this same letter Lushington writes of a conversation with George Brodrick, Warden of Merton College, in which the matters of strikes was raised. Broderick considered it wrong for outsiders to provide financial assistance to either side. Lushington wrote, “This was too much for meek & circumspect me: & I think I did a little shake him on the point, at any rate I showed him there were two opinions upon it.”