Sir (Edwin) Ray Lankester
Vanity Fair Print
£50.00
Out of stock
Sir Edwin Ray Lankester KCB FRS (15 May 1847 – 13 August 1929) was a British zoologist.
Lankester appears, thinly disguised, in several novels. He is the model for Sir Roderick Dover in H. G. Wells' Marriage (Wells had been one of his students), and in Robert Briffault's Europa, which contains a brilliant portrait of Lankester, including his friendship with Karl Marx. (Lankester was one of the thirteen people at Marx's funeral.) He has also been suggested as the model for Professor Challenger in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, but Doyle himself said that Challenger was based on a professor of physiology at the University of Edinburgh named William Rutherford.
Lankester never married. In 1895, he was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest while in the company of a group of female prostitutes on the street, but was acquitted. (It is incorrect, as has been alleged, that the charge concerned homosexual offences.) He died in London on 13 August 1929.
Condition - good
by Sir Leslie Ward
watercolour, published in Vanity Fair 12 January 1905
40x24cm