Edmund Law Lushington

Dr. Edmund Law Lushington was born on 10 January 1811 in Park House, Kent, England. He was the son of Edmund Henry Lushington (Bencher of the Inner Temple, Puisne Judge in Ceylon, Chairman and Chief Commissioner of the Colonial Audit Board, Master of the Crown Office) and Sophia Phillips.

Educated at Charterhouse and as a Greek scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a close friend of Alfred Lord Tennyson in the late 1820s.

On 14 October 1842 he married Cecilia Tennyson, daughter of Reverend George Clayton Tennyson, and younger sister of Alfred Lord Tennyson, in Boxley, Kent, England. To mark the occasion Tennyson wrote as an epilogue to his poem In Memoriam (1850), an epithalamium (nuptial poem) on Cecilia and Edmund's marriage. Lushingston remained one of Tennyson's closest life-long friends, as well as being his brother-in-law.

A Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, Lushington went on to become a Professor of Greek at Glasgow University (1837-74) - where he was also later elected Lord Rector (1884-87)

He died in 1893.

He had four children: Edmund ("Eddy"), Cecilia ("Zilly"), Emily ("Emmy"), and Lucy. Edward Lear made many gifts to the Lushington children included an album containing drawings of birds, animals and landscapes, which he presented to Zilly on her tenth birthday in 1855.