ABSTRACT
In her Journal for 21 June 1855 George Eliot recorded her review of the 1855 reprint of Lord Brougham's Lives of Menof Letters and Science, Who Flourished in the Time of George III, 2 vols., first published in 1845-1846. Two days after finishing the review she wrote to Sara Hennell, saying 'I have written a castigation of Lord Brougham for the Leader, and shall be glad if your sympathy goes along with it.' 1 The sympathy of her friends at Coventry was apparently less than perfect, however, for on 16 July she wrote to Charles Bray, explaining that:
The article on Lord Brougham was written conscientiously, and you seem to have misunderstood its purpose, in taking it for mere word quibbling. I consider it criminal in a man to prostitute Literature for the purposes of his own vanity and this is what Lord Brougham has done. A man who has something vitally important to mankind to say, may be excused for saying it in bad English. In such a case criticism of style is irrelevant. But Literature is Fine Art, and the man who writes mere literature with insolent slovenliness is as inexcusable as a man who gets up in a full drawing-room to sing Rossini's music in a cracked voice and out of tune. Because Lord Brougham has done some services to the public it does not follow that he is to be treated with anything else than justice when he is doing injury to the public, and I consider his 'Lives' bad and injurious. I say thus much in vindication of my view of right, not at all in vindication of my article. 2
