Lewes, GEORGE HENRY, littérateur, was born in London, a popular comedian's grandson, 18th April 1817. Educated partly at Greenwich under Dr Burney, and partly in Jersey and Brittany, he left school early to enter first a notary's office, and then the house of a Russian merchant. He next tried walking the hospitals, but could not stand the horrors of the operating-room; so in 1838 he proceeded to Germany, and remained there nearly two years, studying the life, language, and literature of the country. On his return to London he fell to work writing about anything and everything as a Penny Encyclopædist and Morning Chronicler, as a contributor afterwards to a dozen more journals, reviews, and magazines, and as editor of the Leader (1851–54), and of the Fortnightly (1865–66), which he himself had founded. He 'began life,' says Mr Frederic Harrison, 'as a journalist, a critic, a novelist, a dramatist, a biographer, and an essayist; he closed it as a mathematician, a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, a psychologist, and the author of a system of abstract general philosophy.' The change was rendered possible, Mr Leslie Stephen points out, by George Eliot's literary successes. Lewes was married unhappily and had children, when his connection with her began in July 1854; it ended only with his death at their house in Regent's Park, 30th November 1878. An intellect clear and sharp, if not remarkably strong, a wit lively and piquant, if not very rich, sympathies warm, if not wide, and a style as firm as it is graceful, made Lewes one of the best of critics and biographers; as a populariser of philosophy he was inferior to none, as a populariser of science inferior to very few.
His works, besides a tragedy and a couple of novels (1841–48), include the Biographical History of Philosophy (1845; recast in the 3d edition of 1867 as The History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte); The Spanish Drama, Lope de Vega and Calderon (1846); a Life of Robespierre (1848); Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences (1853), which is much more than a mere translation; the admirable Life and Works of Goethe (1855); Seaside Studies at Ifraconombe (1858); Physiology of Common Life (1859–60); Studies in Animal Life (1862); Aristotle (1864); On Actors and the Art of Acting (1875); and Problems of Life and Mind (1874–79), its five volumes dealing with 'The Foundations of a Creed,' 'The Physical Basis of Mind,' 'The Study of Psychology,' and 'Mind as a Function of the Organism.' See ELIOT (GEORGE), with works there cited, and an article by Anthony Trollope in the Fortnightly for January 1879.