Miscellaneous writer. Born in St. Petersburg; son of a Russia merchant. Student at Eton; B.A. Cambridge, 1850; M.A. 1853. Admitted at Lincoln's Inn; called to the bar, 1858; went the South-eastern Circuit. M.P. for Devonport, 1868-1874. Among his contributions to periodicals was an article on Eton in Macmillan's. Author of Sketches of Cantabs, 1849; Across the Atlantic, 1850; Our College, 1857; Science and Revelation, 1871; Hints for the "Evidences of Spiritualism", 1872. Also wrote works in French; published edition of Juvenal's satires and a translation of Pliny's letters. At time of his death, engaged on edition of Seneca and an English-French dictionary.

James Payn thought Sketches of Cantabs "the liveliest little book ever written by an undergraduate" (Some Literary Recollections, p. 53). Its "keenness of observation", he wrote, "greatly impressed Dickens, who told me that he had applied to [Lewis] in consequence to write for Household Words and added that it was the only case in which he had ever done so".

His first H.W. contribution, in the form of a letter to the editor, Lewis signed "John Smith"—the pseudonym under which he had published Sketches of Cantabs.

Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography