A man of remarkable intellectual versatility, George Henry Lewes wrote biographies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Maximilien Robespierre, a multivolume biographical history of a wide range of philosophers, and biographical articles on Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charles Lamb, while also making significant contributions to the fields of philosophy, literature, science, and psychology. His biography of Goethe was the first to cover the author's entire life, and it was an immediate success, winning the praises of Thomas Carlyle and many German critics. His lucid and engaging prose enlivened his biographies while making diverse and complex subjects such as positivism, marine biology, literary criticism, and the relation between psychology and physiology accessible to the general reading public. As a biographer, Lewes chose not to idealize his subjects but to present the truth of their lives as objectively as possible. He did not moralize or judge, as did many of his Victorian colleagues.
