As a writer he was best known for three decades in which he was a major contributor to Punch as well as founding editor of Granta magazine.

His father was Augustus Frederick Lehmann, a merchant and steel manufacturer whose brothers Henri and Rudolf were both noted academic artists.

Their social circle included Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Lord Leighton and other prominent figures.

He wrote perhaps the first series of Sherlock Holmes parodies in Punch from August until early November 1894; they were collected in 1901 as a book entitled The Adventures of Picklock Holes.

He tried his hand as a lyricist in such works as His Majesty, a comic opera in the Gilbert and Sullivan vein, with music by Alexander Mackenzie, a libretto by F. C. Burnand and additional lyrics by Adrian Ross, presented at the Savoy Theatre in 1897.

[4] He was appointed as editor of the Daily News in 1901 following the resignation of Sir John Richard Robinson.

[1] Lehmann lived with his family at Bourne End, Buckinghamshire in a large house called Fieldhead.