George Henry Lewes

George Henry Lewes wrote the first English life of Goethe, did serious physiological research, and is remembered mostly as the man George Eliot could not marry. He was brought up irregularly, educated in Jersey, Brittany and London, tried medicine and could not stand the dissecting room, acted on the stage, and wrote plays, novels and criticism for a living. He was a genuine polymath in a period that still allowed it: his Biographical History of Philosophy went through many editions, his Life of Goethe in 1855 remained the standard English account for half a century, and his later Problems of Life and Mind attempted a physiological psychology, with laboratory work on nerves and reflexes done at home. He had married Agnes Jervis in an open arrangement and registered as his own the first children she had by his friend Thornton Hunt, which was legally taken as condoning the adultery and left him permanently unable to divorce. From 1854 he lived with Marian Evans; he encouraged her to try fiction, handled the negotiations and reviews she could not face, and shielded her from criticism to a degree contemporaries found comic. She was writing Theophrastus Such when he died. He edited the Leader and was the founding editor of the Fortnightly Review, which he set up on the principle that contributors should sign their articles rather than write anonymously - a change that reshaped English periodical writing. His Seaside Studies and Studies in Animal Life came out of long stretches of shore collecting with Marian Evans in Devon and Wales. He was an early and serious English advocate of Comte and of Spinoza, whose Ethics Evans translated at his urging. His son Thornton died of tuberculosis of the spine in 1869, nursed by both of them. Evans finished his unpublished volumes after his death and endowed a studentship in physiology in his name.

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