George Henry Lewes, assured of a place in literary history for his influence on the life and work of novelist George Eliot, left his own mark on mid-Victorian literature in several areas: as a versatile man of letters; as a thoughtful interpreter and popularizer of philosophy, biology, and psychology who made original contributions to all three fields; and especially as a literary theorist, critic, and biographer of wide range and considerable insight, not of the first rank but high in the second. Victorian readers of his nonfiction--about 250 periodical articles and sixteen books--found clear, lively, sometimes humorous expositions of an impressive range of subjects: Goethe and George Sand, Comte and Darwin, German aesthetics and French historiography, performances of actors and fallacies of spontaneous combustion. Lewes was also known as a novelist, a writer of stage plays, an actor, a public lecturer, the editor of several periodicals, and a researcher...