'Under The Cedar'. The Lushingtons of Pyports. A Victorian Family in Cobham - and elsewhere in Surrey'. Open the biography of most of the great names of the nineteenth century and you are likely to find a reference to a Lushington. Stephen Lushington was a notable lawyer and campaigner for social issues. He worked with Wilberforce for the abolition of the Slave Trade. He represented Queen Caroline and Lady Byron in their matrimonial difficulties. He was painted by Holman Hunt and G.F. Watts. His son Vernon was involved with the early Christian Socialists and the London Working Men's' College where he worked alongside John Ruskin and F.D. Maurice. Vernon Lushington abandoned Christianity for Auguste Comte's Positivism and the Religion of Humanity. William Morris was Lushington's 'friend of my youth' and it was he who introduced Burne Jones to Rossetti, an event which led to the second phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Vernon's daughters were talented musicians and Hubert Parry wrote music for them. They were also close childhood friends of the family of Sir Leslie Stephen and Kitty Lushington was the model for Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway'.
Kitty's engagement to Leopold Maxse was used by Woolf in 'To the Lighthouse'. Based on a recently unearthed archive of thousands of family letters, diaries and photographs, this book places the Lushingtons in the local context of their Surrey home and tells of their domestic life and many of the notable friends who visited them both at Ockham Park and Pyports, Cobham. In the book's foreword Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes writes, 'The Lushingtons of Pyports may not quite outrank the Crawleys of Downton Abbey, but in many ways their lives ran in parallel, reflecting the events of the closing years of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century as Europe headed for the 'war to end all wars.' Dr Gillian Sutherland of Newnham College, Cambridge writes , 'The riches of the Lushington archives have enabled David Taylor to set the family who lived at Pyports in the second half of the nineteenth century not only in their local context but also in the their national context. He paints a vivid and engaging picture of a cultivated, well-connected and affluent professional family who took full and creative parts in all the live around them.'
- ISBN10 1781484031
- ISBN13 9781781484036
- Publish Date 28 October 2015
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 16 August 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 160
- Language English