George Henry Lewes’s Final Accounts

Abstract

Some of the contents of George Eliot’s (GE’s) and George Henry Lewes’s (GHL’s) diaries have been published, with the exception of information on their final pages. GHL’s hitherto unpublished final diary entries for 1878 reveal expenditure at a detailed level, displaying the exact amounts he owed, credit, payments, investments, and returns. In spite of his handwriting becoming increasingly more difficult to decipher, much is revealed and patterns emerge. This account presents his itemized “Memoranda 1878,” which are analyzed and compared with previous years, followed by a transcription of the “Cash Account” for January 1878 that preserves insofar as possible the layout of the original handwritten page, commentary on those accounts, and then a summary and analysis of all subsequent months leading up to Lewes’s death at the end of November. This article draws upon the strength and pitfalls of AI, without which some of the following work could not have been undertaken, especially at the level of identifying various specific investments. Any mistakes that remain are, of course, the author’s own.