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
Olivia Rossetti Agresti magazine "The Germ". A granddaughter of Gabriele Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, she was hence a niece of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, as well as a first cousin of Ford Madox Ford. While still in their girlhood, Olivia and her sister, the future Helen Rossetti Angeli (1879-1969), began publishing an anarchist journal, "The Torch", in the basement of their family home. Despite their youth, this effort became the nucleus of a prominent anarchist salon which included Peter Kropotkin and Sergei Kravchinski, and their publishing coups included the pamphlet "Why I Am an Anarchist" by George