ABSTRACT
Unsigned review, London Leader (1857). Included in Imprints, pp. 48–9.
For reason to think that this review may have been written by G. H. Lewes, see Dowden, p. 240. Dowden quotes a letter to him written by W. M. Rossetti in 1884 in which henotes that Lewes was the editor of the (London) Leader at the time of the appearance of Leaves of Grass and remembers his having written ‘something discerning’ about Whitman. Rossetti assured Dowden that though the notice was unsigned, it was generally attributed to Lewes. Dowden adds: ‘This article I have not seen.’ George Eliot, who quotes some lines from Leaves of Grass as an epigraph to book 4, chapter 29, of her novel Daniel Deronda, may have had her attention first directed to the poet by Lewes, though Buxton Forman many years later claimed credit for urging her to read Whitman again after she had told him in conversation that Leaves of Grass had ‘no message for her soul’.
Lewes, George Henry (1817–78), British philosopher and literary critic, wrote essays on drama which were collected into several volumes. He had married in 1840, but in 1851 he became acquainted with Marian Evans (George Eliot) and in 1854 left his wife. His best known work is his Life of Goethe (1855).
