Sir Richard Rawlinson Vyvyan, 8th Baronet (6 June 1800 – 15 August 1879) was an English landowner and Tory politician who sat in the House of Commons variously between 1825 and 1857.
[6] He was also the patron of Charles Thomas Pearce, who he initially employed as his secretary in about 1843, and with whom he undertook "researches on light, heat, and magnetism of the Moon's rays" over a period of years.
Between 1846 and 1848, they shared a house built by Decimus Burton in London's Regent's Park, called St. Dunstan's Villa.
[7] Historian of science Pietro Corsi has written that Vyvyan "endorsed a quasi-Lamarckian transformation of species, together with phrenology and a broadly evolutionary cosmology.
His letter to the magistrates of Berkshire on their practice of 'consigning prisoners to solitary confinement before trial, and ordering them to be disguised by masks,' passed into a second edition in 1845.