ABSTRACT
Over a period of nearly forty years, George Henry Lewes and George Eliot assessed and appreciated Victor Hugo, whose variety of career and life experiences — as playwright, novelist, poet, polemicist, and intermittent exile — resembled their own. George Henry Lewes's early reviews, in 1840, paid passionate tribute to Hugo's dramas; George Eliot's final book, in 1879, made multiple allusions to Hugo's novels. Their judgements of his work, however, were ambivalent: George Henry Lewes came to see Hugo as superficially impressive, but emotionally shallow, and George Eliot singled out for praise in Hugo's poetry the least Hugolian aspects she could find. This essay examines their direct references to Hugo's work — in published reviews, in letters, in journals, and in fiction — and it will lead, in the end, to the speculation that George Eliot's reading of Hugo's The Man Who Laughs (1869) may be partially responsible for her departure, in Daniel Deronda, from the aesthetic of 'natural history' expressed in her essays and early fiction.1
