A ‘Less than Enthusiastic’ Friendship: John Morley, George Eliot, and George Henry Lewes

Abstract For roughly a decade, John Morley enjoyed a warm and deferential sociality with George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. The basis for their friendship was the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, which initially held great appeal to Morley, who had lost his religious faith while studying as an undergraduate at Balliol, Oxford. While Lewes and Eliot’s views on Comte were largely fixed by middle age, Morley, still in his twenties, was searching for a substitute belief system. As Morley began to embrace the liberal philosophy of (and form a friendship with) John Stuart Mill, who had declared himself to be an antagonist of Comte’s, Morley, Lewes, and Eliot increasingly held less in common. This lack of commonality gave Morley the critical distance to reassess the couple both personally and intellectually. Embracing a new philosophy and divergent aesthetic preferences, Morley developed an equivocal view of his friends, roughly two decades his senior. Utilizing letters, diary entries, published writings, and a previously untranslated document in French, this essay provides a complex portrait of an intergenerational friendship among three nineteenth-century intellectuals.