Apprenticed at first to a Mr. Ginney, a surgeon of Woodbridge, in 1832 he became Assistant to Thomas Spurgin of Saffron Walden. Spurgin raised £300 to enable Edwin to study medicine and science from 1834–7 at the new University College London. He attended lectures by John Lindley (botany) and Robert Edmund Grant (zoology) – to whose post Edwin's eldest son E. Ray Lankester succeeded in 1875. Grant had been one of Darwin's tutors at Edinburgh. Edwin's friends at UCL included William Jenner and William Benjamin Carpenter.