Vernon Lushington Thomas Hughes, and Richard Buckley Litchfield, 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 who gravitated to the Working Men's College. In 1856, it was he who first introduced Edward Burne-Jones to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his college rooms. Rossetti used Lushington’s wife, Jane, as a model in 1865. Lushington, friend of William Morris, was a frequent visitor to Kelmscott Manor. He was a close friend of Leslie Stephen and his family; Stephen’s daughter Virginia (later Woolf) based her character
Rossetti and His Circle a red torch somewhere in a dense fog. And so he still shines for me." Beerbohm's caricatures include Dante Gabriel Rossetti with his sister Christina, John Ruskin, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Holman Hunt, John Millais and George Meredith. In plate 22, Oscar Wilde, on his 1882 lecture tour in America, describes the delights of the Aesthetic Movement to a fascinated audience. This tour had been organised by Richard D'Oyly Carte to publicise the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera "Patience". Sir Hugh Walpole bequeathed Beerbohm's original watercolour artwork for "Rossetti and His Circle" to the Tate Collection in London in 1941.