Edward Gibbon Swainson and Edward William Walker

A carte-de-visite portrait of two Cambridge students dressed as the two ugly sisters in a university production of Cinderella. An inked inscription in the lower margin gives a quote from the pantomime: ‘To your vulgar appearance you seem most insensible.’ The inscription also gives the names of the two characters, Clorinda and Thisbe - their names in Rossini’s two-act opera La Cenerentola - and the initials of the two students playing them.

‘E.G.S.’ must be Edward Gibbon Swainson who went up to Trinity in the Michaelmas term of 1863. Born on 4 October 1844 at Aigburth, he was the son of Liverpool merchant and cotton broker John Swainson. He graduated BA in 1867. According to Alumni Cantabrigienses, He ‘joined the Roman Catholic Church, becoming a member of the Dominican Order, at Ditton, near Liverpool.’ At the time of the 1891 census, he was a ‘Roman Catholic priest’ living in Brighton at 6 Grand Parade. He died, aged 49, of pneumonia at Portsmouth on 8 April 1894.

‘E.W.W.’ is Edward William Walker, who, like Swainson, was educated at Harrow before going up to Trinity in the Michaelmas term of 1863. Born at Chester on 4 April 1844, he was the eldest son of Sir Edward Samuel Walker. He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1866 and called to the Bar on 16 November 1868. In February 1876 he was named as the co-respondent in the divorce of Alfred Campbell Halliburton Jones. Later that year he married the former Mrs Jones, née Elizabeth Ewell. The couple appear on the 1881 census living at Dawlish in Devon, at which time Edward was a magistrate. He died on 3 July 1899 at the Hotel du Nord in Cologne, Germany.

Photographed by the Farren Brothers of Cambridge.