Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot

Abstract

Years after his transition from man of letters to man of science, George Henry Lewes brought his experience with neurophysiology to bear on contemporary fiction. In his 1872 essay "Dickens in Relation to Criticism," Lewes tries to provide a balanced assessment of the strengths and shortcomings of the novelist, who had died two years before. Largely because of two unusual scientific comparisons, however, many readers regarded his article as an attack on Dickens, with whom Lewes had in fact been friendly--despite their public feud over the scientific verisimilitude of Mr. Krook's spontaneous combustion in Bleak House (1852-53). First Lewes compares the "vividness of imagination" in the novelist's work to the intensity of "hallucinations," a trait Lewes has found in "no other perfectly sane mind." 1 Later, Lewes considers the problem of character and caricature in Dickens and produces an even more peculiar--and to many friends of Dickens peculiarly offensive--comparison:

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