to be young in.”1 Throughout the decade, there was a constant undercurrent of radical unrest and social upheaval which resulted in the universities producing a new type of student said to be:
Somewhat arrogant and somewhat shy, very conscious of their standing as gentlemen but very conscious of their duties too, men in tweeds who smoke on the streets, disciples of Maurice, willing hearers of Carlyle, passionate for drains and co-operative societies.2
Although earlier national anxieties concerning religion and revolution still persisted, they were in a much milder form. Chartism had failed and Newman’s Tractarianism no longer presented a threat to the established church. Instead, the challenge came from science and Biblical criticism and the decade culminated with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the controversial religious publication Essays and Reviews.
Writing to Harry Govier Seeley, Lushington called this time his “tropic season of life . . . that season of highest hopes, highest pleasures, deepest griefs, above all the season of arduous experiments upon oneself & the world.”3 Lushington spent the early years of the decade at Cambridge University where he became both a “disciple” of the Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice, and a “willing hearer” of the historian and writer Thomas Carlyle.
Although his brother Godfrey went to Oxford, Lushington chose Cambridge which was far more suited to his temperament and growing social awareness. A brief flaring of religious enthusiasm at Cambridge in the early nineteenth century under the charismatic evangelical preacher Charles Simeon, was followed by a steady decline of upper-class evangelical fervor so much so that, by the time that Lushington went up, Christian belief there was said to be more:
an attitude of the soul rather than a dogmatic creed . . . the incarnation was more a basis for living, less a considered solution to a philosophical problem. It was Jesus, revealer of the principles of the ideal society, not Christ, window to God and the divine ideal . . . Among Cambridge liberals, the tendency was to seek agreement with Comte on service to humanity rather than to settle disagreements about the nature of knowledge.4
At this time Cambridge was still under the spell of the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, earlier in the century, had developed the concept of a “national clerisy,” a secular intellectual elite capable of seeing and valuing the best in the national cultural heritage and raising the standard of intellectual life. John Sterling, a founder of the Cambridge Apostles, wrote how Coleridge had taught him “that an empirical philosophy is none, that Faith is the highest Reason, that all criticism, whether of literature, laws, or manners, is blind, without the power of discerning the organic unity of the object.”
Trinity—“Far the Most Liberal College”
Lushington entered Trinity College in 1852 as a “pensioner,” which meant that he, or more likely, his father, paid full fees together with his board and lodging. The choice of Trinity may well have been influenced by the fact that it was the alma mater of his distant cousins, Henry and Franklin Lushington who had been there a few years earlier. When, in 1871, the geologist Adam Sedgwick wrote to Stephen Lushington inviting him to visit Cambridge, he added, “The very name of Lushington is, in Trinity College, associated with many pleasant remembrances.”5
Trinity College had the reputation of being the most liberal within Cambridge University and its members were in the forefront the university reform—a fact commented on by Godfrey Lushington in his essay in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in which, risking the appearance of disloyalty to his own college of Wadham, Oxford, he generously praised what he saw at his brother’s college:
Nothing struck me more in visiting Trinity Cambridge, than to observe how independent their men are of those who do not suit them: how much more freely richer and poorer mixed together; and how much more decided was the literary element of the place, because it embodied into a set, instead of, as at Oxford, being scattered amongst the various little worlds of the colleges6.
A key figure at Trinity College at this time was Julius Hare, a broad-church theologian at the center of an influential circle of liberal-minded Anglicans who were among the first in England to discover a new understanding of history that was coming out of the German universities.
University Friendships
After arriving at Cambridge, Lushington was drawn into a set of like-minded companions where his warm, outgoing, personality soon made a favorable impression. He threw himself into university life with great enthusiasm leading his fellow student, and the future Master of Trinity, Henry Montague Butler, to write:
[Vernon Lushington] the facsimile of his Rugby brother, has just come up, to stay his three years. I have seen a good deal of him already, and look forward to knowing him. He seems of an uncommonly bold independent disposition, thoroughly in earnest with whatever he takes up, and with nothing of narrowness or bigotry in his composition as far as I can judge from one or two discussions I have had with him. He is supposed to be a very good speaker.7
Lushington naturally gravitated towards friendships among fellow undergraduates with whom his family had existing links. These included Charles Edward Babington, a grandson of Thomas Babington who had been a member of the Clapham Sect, and who had worked with Stephen Lushington and William Wilberforce for the abolition of the slave trade.8
Lushington wrote home to his sister Alice:
I am now once settled over my books, & working away valiantly. I saw Babington last night, & breakfasted with him & Montague Butler this morning—From them I learnt that I had passed the Little go safely—no great feat certainly, but still a satisfactory assurance—& that as far as they knew, all my friends likewise amongst them though with considerable danger.9
Babington was one of Lushington’s closest colleagues at Cambridge and their friendship demonstrated how ties between the families in, or associated with, the Clapham Sect could extend into the third generation even though they no longer shared the same evangelical faith.10 In 1853, Lushington stayed with Babington and his family in Lichfield on his way home from a reading party in Ireland.11 The next year, following another visit, Lushington wrote, “Babington & I are of course happy together. I like his father too—a kind, simple hearted old man, full of historical gossip, wh[ich] amuses me greatly—& evidently of kind generous feeling too.”12 Babington’s sudden death in 1865 came as a great shock to all his old university friends and Montague Butler remarked:
To poor Vernon it is almost the saddest loss that could have happened. He and Babington, thoroughly different, the one living in the active and fiery future, the other a truly noble specimen of the old chivalrous Tory (not Conservative), were everything to one another. Babington’s influence brought out in him his love for Wordsworth and Ruskin, and for outward nature, and indeed many of the gentler parts of his character.13
Another of Lushigton's close, and life-long, friendships forged at Trinity was with Richard Buckley Litchfield who later married Charles Darwin’s daughter.14 In their bachelor days, the two men spent several walking holidays together, both in the United Kingdom and in Europe, and were invited to visit John Ruskin in Switzerland in 1859.15
Wilfred Heeley, another of Lushington's contemporaries at Trinity, wrote:
One of the jolliest men I know in Trinity . . . The young Lushington had been a middy for three years, cruising about in the Indian Ocean, having rencontres with Arabs &c, then comes up to Cambridge and takes up arms against a sea of troubles, classical and mathematical. He is thoroughly frank, open and sailor like, earnest and enthusiastic, extremely Radical, but not wildly, taking a great interest in all questions of political economy and moral
