SOURCE: Kaminsky, Alice R. Introduction to Literary Criticism of George Henry Lewes, pp. ix-xxi. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964.

In the following essay, Kaminsky suggests that Lewes's worth as a literary critic is far greater than his diminishing reputation in the years following his death would indicate.

Emily Dickinson once remarked that “Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.” When George Henry Lewes died, Matthew Arnold and other eminent Victorians predicted that his fame would endure. Yet curiously enough, one of the most remarkable men of the nineteenth century, esteemed as philosopher, scientist, and critic, is today more readily identified as the writer who lived with George Eliot. He deserved more. Even in an age which produced such figures as Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and Mill, Lewes was a rare enough phenomenon, a thinker equally at ease in the fields of science and literature, viewing them not...