George Henry LewesArticle Free Pass George Henry Lewes, (born
April 18, 1817, London, Eng.—died Nov. 28, 1878, London),
English biographer, literary critic, dramatist, novelist,
philosopher, actor, scientist, and editor, remembered chiefly
for his decades-long liaison with the novelist Mary Ann Evans
(better known by her pseudonym, George Eliot). After a desultory
education, Lewes spent two years in Germany and returned to
London in 1840. During the next decade he wrote frequently for
various journals and in the early 1840s corresponded with John
Stuart Mill, through whom he became acquainted with the
positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, usually considered the
founder of sociology. In 1850 Lewes and his friend Thornton
Leigh Hunt founded a radical weekly called The Leader, for which
he wrote the literary and theatrical features. His Comte’s
Philosophy of the Sciences (1853) originally appeared as a
series of articles in The Leader. Lewes married in 1841, and the
couple lived communally with Hunt and his wi