Edward John Payne (22 July 1844 – 26 December 1904) was an English barrister and historian specializing in colonial history.
The elder son of Edward William Payne, of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, Payne was educated at High Wycombe Royal Grammar School and at Magdalen Hall and Charsley's Hall, Oxford, taking a second in Honour Moderations (Latin and Greek literature) in the Trinity Term of 1869[1] and a first class degree in Literae Humaniores in 1871.
In 1880 he gave a musical lecture-recital, when he played pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Handel, Caix and Abel.
[3] His wife was a niece of the German historian Georg Heinrich Pertz and of the Swedenborgian writer James John Garth Wilkinson.
[2] Despite the shortness of his marriage, he was the father of three children, the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979),[6] the archaeologist Humfry Payne (1902–1936), who married the writer Dilys Powell (1901–1995)[5][7] and Leonora Florence Mary Payne (1904-1996), who married the architectural historian Walter Ison, with whom she produced, amongst other books, 'The Georgian Buildings of Bath'.