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Dickens and Lewes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Gordon S. Haight
Gordon S. Haight*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
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Extract

No reader of John Forster's Life would suspect that Dickens was a good friend of George Henry Lewes for thirty-two years, almost as long as he knew Forster himself. In the first two volumes of the book Lewes' name is mentioned only twice, once in the cast of a play, and once in a page-long list of “other acquaintances”: “Mr. George Henry Lewes he had an old and great regard for; among other men of letters should not be forgotten the cordial Thomas Ingoldsby.… ” J. W. T. Ley, the editor of Forster's Life of Dickens, thought that this shabby allusion was inserted to placate Lewes,

who had certainly been a friend of Dickens, but whose aid had been utterly rejected in the writing of this book. Lewes was certainly offended at Forster's determination to rely wholly upon his own knowledge of Dickens. Wilkie Collins was offended, too, and there were others who, in Dickens's lifetime and afterwards, resented the way in which Forster was apt to arrogate the novelist all to himself. There never was a more jealous friend than Forster. There are no records of the friendship with Lewes. He and Dickens were on excellent terms always, but there were no “intimacies of friendship.” Lewes's article in the Fortnightly Review in 1871 [i.e., 1872] showed that he did not understand Dickens, that he viewed him with eyes that saw only externals. He took part in some of the theatricals, (p. 544)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , March 1956 , pp. 166 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (London, [1928]), pp. 456, 531.

2 The Works of Bernard Shaw (London, 1930–34), xxv, 163.

3 “Dickens in Relation to Criticism,” Fortnightly Rev., xvii (Feb. 1872), 152.

4 Sotheby and Co. Catalogue, 27 June 1923, item 610.

5 From the playbills in Colonel Richard Gimbel's collection.

6 The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (London, 1938), ii, 72.

7 Lewes' Diary, 6 Dec. 1875 (Yale).

8 Dickens Letters, ii, 90.

9 Nineteenth-Century Fiction, x (June 1955), 53–63.

10 The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, 1954), ii, 423–424.

11 Dickens Letters, iii, 100.

12 The George Eliot Letters, iii, 114–115.

13 Dickens Letters, iii, 115.

14 The George Eliot Letters, iii, 195.

15 Actually 21 years. Dickens rented the cottage at Twickenham during June and July 1838. This is quoted from Lewes' Journal, 10 Nov. 1859 (Yale).

16 The George Eliot Letters, iii, 203–204.

17 Dickens Letters, iii, 150–151.

18 The George Eliot Letters, iii, 279.

19 Lewes' Journal, 27 Feb. 1862 (Yale).

20 Fortnightly Rev., xvii (Feb. 1872), 143.

21 Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York, 1952), i, 204.

22 Anthony Trollope, “George Henry Lewes,” Fortnightly Rev., xxxi (Jan. 1879), 23.

23 The only source I know of this remark is Ley's note, p. 544. In his Fortnightly article Lewes was careful to say little about the Life; but he wrote Blackwood 25 Nov. 1872 that he thought Forster's book “a lasting injury to his friend, whom it presents in a constant state of rouge and footlights.”