The Complicity of Friends: How George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and John Hughlings-Jackson Encoded Herbert Spencer’s Secret (2014)
Raitiere, Martin N. (Author)
Bucknell University Press
Physical Details: 402 pages
Language: English
One of Victorian England’s most famous philosophers harbored a secret: Herbert Spencer suffered from an illness so laden with stigma that he feared its revelation would ruin him. He therefore went to extraordinary lengths to hide his malady from the public. Exceptionally, he drew two of his closest friends—the novelist George Eliot and her partner, G. H. Lewes—into his secret. Years later, he also shared it with a remarkable neurologist, John Hughlings-Jackson, better placed than anyone else in England to understand his illness. Spencer insisted that all three support him without betraying his condition to others—and two of them did so. But George Eliot, still smarting from Spencer’s rejection, years earlier, of her offer of love, did not. Ingeniously, she devised a means both of nominally respecting (for their contemporaries) and of violating (for our benefit) Spencer’s injunction. What she hid from her peers she reveals to us in an act of deferred, but audacious literary revenge. It’s here decoded for the first time. Indeed The Complicity of Friends comprises the first disclosure of Spencer’s hidden frailty but also, more importantly, of the responses it generated in the lives and works of his three notable friends. This book provides a complete rethinking of its principal figures. The novelist who emerges in these pages is a more sinuous and passionate George Eliot than the oracular Victorian we are used to hearing about. The significance of the friendship between Lewes, her irrepressible partner, and the inventive Hughlings-Jackson is outlined for the first time. And in an ironic twist, even his three farsighted confidants could not anticipate that, late in the twentieth century, certain of Spencer’s own intuitions about the nature and provenance of his illness would be vindicated. Those with any interest in George Eliot, Lewes, Hughlings-Jackson, or Spencer will be compelled to re-envision their personalities after reading The Complicity of Friends.
...MoreReview Samuel H. Greenblatt (2017) Review of "The Complicity of Friends: How George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and John Hughlings-Jackson Encoded Herbert Spencer’s Secret". Journal of the History of the Neurosciences (pp. 339-340).
Similar Citations
Book
Michael Davis;
(2006)
George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country
(/isis/citation/CBB890472950/)
Article
Alexis A. Ferguson;
(2024)
On knowing nature's syntax: Preliminary cisness, victorian physiology and George Eliot
(/isis/citation/CBB501171934/)
Book
Garratt, Peter;
(2010)
Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot
(/isis/citation/CBB001251222/)
Book
Rylance, Rick;
(2000)
Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850-1880
(/isis/citation/CBB000102109/)
Article
Smith, C. U. M.;
(2012)
Philosophy's Loss, Neurology's Gain: The Endeavor of John Hughlings-Jackson
(/isis/citation/CBB001201292/)
Article
Richardson, Angelique;
(2010)
Darwin and Reductionisms: Victorian, Neo-Darwinian and Postgenomic Biologies
(/isis/citation/CBB001022449/)
Article
Tansey, E.M.;
(1990)
George Eliot's support for physiology: The George Henry Lewes Trust, 1879-1939
(/isis/citation/CBB000056678/)
Article
Currie, Richard A.;
(1997)
Lewes's general mind and the judgment of St. Ogg's: The Mill on the Floss as scientific text
(/isis/citation/CBB000074594/)
Article
Carignan, Michael;
(2003)
Analogical Reasoning in Victorian Historical Epistemology
(/isis/citation/CBB000774481/)
Article
Smith, C. U. M.;
(1982)
Evolution and the problem of the mind: Part I. Herbert Spencer. Part II: John Hughlings Jackson
(/isis/citation/CBB000017894/)
Article
Bogen, James;
(2001)
Two as good as a hundred: Poorly replicated evidence in some nineteenth-century neuroscientific research
(/isis/citation/CBB000100765/)
Article
Peter M. Lee;
(2016)
George Eliot and Mathematics
(/isis/citation/CBB081980225/)
Article
Cameron, Lauren;
(2015)
Spencerian Evolutionary Psychology in Daniel Deronda
(/isis/citation/CBB001550453/)
Book
Paxton, Nancy L.;
(1991)
George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, evolutionism, and the reconstruction of gender
(/isis/citation/CBB000056710/)
Article
Steinberg, David A.;
(2009)
Cerebral Localization in the Nineteenth Century---The Birth of a Science and its Modern Consequences
(/isis/citation/CBB000953425/)
Article
Zina B. Ward;
(2023)
Muscles or Movements? Representation in the Nascent Brain Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB741559709/)
Article
M. Chirimuuta;
(2017)
Hughlings Jackson and the “Doctrine of Concomitance”: Mind-Brain Theorising Between Metaphysics and the Clinic
(/isis/citation/CBB608600329/)
Article
Eadie, M. J.;
(2009)
The Role of Focal Epilepsy in the Development of Jacksonian Localization
(/isis/citation/CBB000953426/)
Thesis
Bassiri, Nima Rad;
(2010)
Dislocations of the Brain: Subjectivity and Cerebral Topology from Descartes to Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience
(/isis/citation/CBB001567167/)
Article
Baker, William;
(1975)
“A problematical thinker” to a “sagacious philosopher”: Some unpublished George Henry Lewes--Herbert Spencer correspondence
(/isis/citation/CBB000018985/)
Be the first to comment!