George Henry Lewes: A Victorian Mind

by Hock G. Tjoa

George Henry Lewes, consort of George Eliot biographer of Robespierre and Goethe, novelist, editor, and critic, was also a scientist and philosopher. An intellectual figure of great importance on the Victorian scene, he has never before received adequate modern scholarly appreciation. In this book Professor Tjoa not only reconstructs Lewes’ theory of criticism and his social and political opinions but also evaluates his contributions to Darwinian science both as original thinker and as popularizer. With skillful discrimination, moreover, Mr. Tjoa has extracted from Lewes’ massive five-volume Problems of Life and Mind a clear and succinct account of Lewes’ metaphysical views. Literature and art, politics and societs science and an in- formed Victorian philosophy of man and the the effervescent Lewes made important contributions to all. Hitherto in danger of surviving in our minds only as the lover, friend, and counselor of one of the Victorian age’s greatest novelists, Lewes emerges in Mr. Ijoa’s brief and lucid study as a thinker to he remembered for his writings as well.

172 pages, Hardcover

First published January 12, 1978

About the author

Hock G. Tjoa was born to Chinese parents and studied history at Brandeis and Harvard. He taught European history and Asian political thought at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He is married and lives with his family in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California.

He published in 2010 The Battle of Chibi (Selections from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) that he had translated, and in 2011, Heaven is High and the Emperor Far Away, A Play that he translated and adapted from Lao She's Teahouse. Both are part of his project to make more widely known traditional Chinese values. In 2013, he published The Chinese Spymaster and The Ingenious Judge Dee, a Play.

Agamemnon Must Die was published (see reviews) in 2014.

Another volume in The Chinese Spymaster series, The Ninja and theDiplomat was published in 2015.

I struggle to bring the Book of Job to life for my current writing project.