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Charles Lee Lewes (1740-1803)

Written by Tim Cockerill

Occupation: Actor

Family Background

Charles Lee Lewes (pronounced Lewis) was born in New Bond Street, London on 20 November 1740 and was baptised at St George's Church, Hanover Square on 7 December 1740 as ‘Charles, son of John and Eleanor Lewes’. On 2 September 1736, his parents had married at the church of St Gregory by St Paul, in the City of London as ‘John Lewes of St George’s, Hanover Square, bachelor and Eleanor Lewthwaite of St Margaret’s, Westminster, spinster’.  In The Memoirs of Charles Lee Lewes, written by himself but not published until 1805, two years after his death, he wrote of his ancestry and connections. Valuable though this may be, it must be taken with a pinch of salt; subsequent research has made it possible to unravel some of the truth, despite his boasting.

Lewes’s father was a hosier in St James’s Street in the City of London and was later a letter carrier, or postman, but his son insists that ‘he was a scholar and a man of extensive reading’. John Lewes was of Welsh extraction and the name was probably originally spelt ‘Lewis’. It may be that ‘Lewes’ was felt to be superior, much as George Romney (1734-1802), the celebrated artist, gentrified his surname from ‘Rumney’ to ‘Romney’, perhaps in acknowledgement of Robert, 2nd baron Romney (1712-1793), a contemporary patron of the arts. Or that he simply wanted a less common spelling than plain Lewis.

Charles Lewes adds that his father was an intimate friend of Dr Edward Young (1683-1765), the author of Night Thoughts, (1742-45), who was attached to the boy when he was only five years old. He goes on to mention Dr Young’s wife, Lady Elizabeth Lee (1694-1740), a daughter of Edward Henry Lee, first Earl of Lichfield (1663-1716). Her first husband and cousin was Colonel Francis Lee, who was Lewes’ godfather, which explains his second name of Lee, which he later assumed having been baptised simply as Charles. His mother Eleanor (baptised at Millom as Ellin in 1697), was the daughter of John Lewthwaite (d. 1737), of Broadgate, Thwaites, Millom, a yeoman of Cumberland. (Lewes incorrectly calls her the daughter of ‘William Lewthwaite, Esq of Broadgate’.) His grandfather John Lewthwaite had married c 1690 another Eleanor, the daughter of William or George Whinfield of Woodland, Kirkby Ireleth. Whinfield himself had married Anne Parke (b. 1642), in 1661, the daughter of Clement Parke (1609-1646) of Whitbeck Hall (now known as Townend), whose son George Whinfield married Joyce Hudleston of Hutton John, Penrith.  Joyce’s brother Father John Hudleston OSB (1608-1698), was the deathbed confessor of King Charles II. From Clement Parke’s family descended Charles Lee Lewes, the Lewthwaites and George Romney.

Not content with this relatively modest background, Charles (Lee) Lewes claimed kinship with ‘the Dowager Lady St Aubyn, Sir John St Aubyn and Sir Francis Bassett’. Cryptically, he thanks them ‘for their unbounded liberality at a very critical moment’, though he does not indicate why. Surprisingly enough, the St Aubyns and Bassetts are indeed related to the Whinfield/Wingfield family, who in the mid-18th century became rich merchants in Newcastle and Durham and changed the spelling of their surname from Whinfield to Wingfield. Lewes’s cousin Elizabeth, daughter of William Wingfield of Durham, married in 1756 Sir John St Aubyn MP (d.1772; ODNB), 4th Bart. Mary, daughter of George Wingfield, another Lewes cousin, married the Revd John Bassett (b.1760), rector of Camborne, Cornwall, whose older brother was Sir Francis Bassett (1757-1835; ODNB),1st Bart. of Tehidy, Cornwall, later Baron de Dunstanville. The Wingfields were also the direct ancestors of the Wingfield-Digby family of Sherborne Castle, Dorset.

He also had a connection with the Lawson family of Isel and Brayton which he mentions in his Memoirs. In the early 1790s his mother's Lewthwaite family were embroiled in a Chancery action concerning the will of her first cousin, John Lewthwaite (1701-1790), a wealthy merchant in Whitehaven, who imported tobacco from the West Indies. This Lewthwaite’s mother was a Lawson and he died childless and partly intestate, leaving an estate of over £100,000. Lewes, his mother and several others were at first thought to be entitled to the estate. However, the Lord Chancellor found in favour of the Lewthwaite cousins of Broadgate and Lewes and his mother did not personally benefit. Lewes wrongly states that Sir Gilford Lawson (actually Sir Gilfred) and a few others won the case, adding that ‘I do not feel a pang of disappointment... no, I have for too long been accustomed to the up and downhill of life’.

Education

Charles Lewes says that his sisters, who were governesses, were indefatigable in improving his education. This seems to support the notion that his father and family were bookish. They provided a polish that enabled them to complete the tutelage of some of the first families in the kingdom, such as those of Lord Bathurst, Lord Hopetown, Lord Lothian and Lord Buckingham. Nevertheless, he records that, in 1747 at the age of seven, he entered Kelsick Grammar School, Ambleside under the Revd Mr Miles (or Mills), where he remained for the next seven years. Founded in 1723 under the will of John Kelsick of Ambleside, this school was free to the inhabitants of the town. Charles may have qualified as he lived locally, but it is unclear why Ambleside was chosen. He was probably a boarder, or at least lodged nearby, as his parents were in London. Having left the school at fourteen, his sisters, tried to persuade Charles to complete his education, but he evaded their clutches to embrace in time the excitement of the stage. In the meantime, his father’s experience as a letter carrier led to Charles working for the Post Office between 1754 and 1760.

Theatrical Career

Charles Lee Lewes, chose Lee Lewes as a simpler stage name and had a career of forty three years. He had a lively, restless temper and was anything but a straightforward actor, specialising in low comedy, as he had the ability to make his audiences laugh. Despite this propensity, he became one of the best known stage performers of his generation, playing an astonishing variety of parts in comedy and tragedy both on the London stage, in the provinces, in Ireland and even in India. They ranged from his first appearance at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden in 1767 as Prince Henry in King John, followed by modest parts in other serious plays by William Shakespeare and more lively pieces such as The Recruiting Officer by George Farquar (1677-1707), Sir Anthony Absolute in The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) and the role of Young Marlowe in She Stoops to Conquer the new comedy by Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774).  This latter playwright was so satisfied by Lewes’s performance in 1773 that he wrote him an epilogue which Lewes spoke for his own benefit, netting £153 and, in 1774, a further £190.

Lewes also had a flair for pantomime, appearing as Harlequin in many performances of Harlequin Skeleton, Harlequin Dr Faustus and Apollo and Daphne, by John Thurmond Jr and remained at Covent Garden for sixteen seasons.  Despite this winter success and tours in the provinces during the summer, his financial career fluctuated over the years and he was imprisoned for debt on at least one occasion. In 1783 Lewes fell out with the management at Covent Garden, probably over his salary, and transferred his allegiance to the other patent theatre at Drury Lane. This move was not a success and his London career began to decline. In the mid-1780s he played again in both Ireland and Scotland. Then, in pursuit of the affluent nabobs, he even ventured overseas to India, but this foray proved a failure.

In November 1787 he was back in London, at Palmer's Royalty Theatre, where he performed Harlequin again in Harlequin Mungo but was then reduced to reciting William Cowper's Diverting History of John Gilpin, a lengthy work in many stanzas about Gilpin, ‘a linen draper bold’. In 1791 Lewes announced that he was now going free-lance and had secured the patronage of the Prince of Wales. He put on two minor plays and another recitation at the Haymarket Theatre, but with disappointing results and the latter proved to be his penultimate appearance in London.

At the age of 52, in 1792, he again decided to seek his future in the provinces, but his talents were clearly on the wane. Again, he toured both Ireland and Scotland and succeeded in getting himself denounced in 1793 by the Rev Alexander Kilham (1762-1798) a street preacher in Aberdeen, in a tract called The Hypocrite detected and exposed; and the true Christian vindicated and supported.  This was a riposte to Lewes's own pamphlet entitled The Stage and the Preacher.

We catch another glimpse of Lewes in a letter of 1794 quoted in Memorials of a family in England and Virginia 1771-1851 and written by Mrs Mary Yates (nee Aglionby) of Skirwith Abbey writing to her son John Yates. She says: ‘I saw your friend Lee Lewis (sic) passing through Penrith on his way to Edinburgh Theatre last week and could not help thinking how much he had formerly delighted you’. Lewes is also known to have performed Falstaff in the Scottish capital, in company with his wife as one of the Merry Wives of Windsor.

By 1795 Lewes was in both in professional and financial difficulties, the Monthly Mirror for December announcing that ‘Lee Lewis (sic) failing in his application for a London engagement means to set sail for America’. Regrettably, this new opportunity was not realised and in May 1803 he was committed to the Fleet prison for debt. In response to his plight, the proprietors of Covent Garden made the house available for Lewes's farewell benefit on 23 June. Here he took the part of Lisardo in Susannah Centlivre’s The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, with Henry Siddons as Don Felix, Mrs Dora Jordan as Violante and Mrs Mattocks as Flora. The benefit was a success but Lewes was by then in a rapid decline and he died a month later.  His son wrote that ‘his sensibility had been severely wounded by the contumlious and repulsive behaviour he had experienced from tyrannical managers’.

The critic John Genest (1764-1839) regarded Charles Lee Lewes as a good actor whose sense of self-importance caused the loss of his career. In contrast, an unnamed critic in 1779 considered his portrayal of Bobadil in Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour totally inadequate, adding that extravagance was not his forte. As a comedian, his peculiar merit was said to be his great volubility and distinct articulation which for many years enabled him to play a great variety of roles.  He appeared regularly in both the best known London theatres and in the provinces, to the apparent satisfaction and amusement of his audiences. He was certainly famous as one of the leading actors of his day, although he was never in the front rank as a serious performer. His fame is evidenced by the fact that at least ten images of him were published, the last in 1804, the year after his death, including his portrait in oils by Nathaniel Hone (1718-1784), in which he holds the music of the song ‘The Wine Vault’ which is now in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham.

Publications

Charles Lee Lewes’s most ambitious project, apparently written whilst in prison for debt, was Memoirs of Charles Lee Lewes, containing Anecdotes of the English and Scottish Stages, in four volumes (1805), edited by his son and published posthumously. It has been described as having ‘an unenviable precedency of worthlessness amongst theatrical compilations’, containing a few highly-coloured pictures of his early life but redeemed somewhat by many apocryphal stories about other actors. John Genest called the Memoirs ‘on the whole an abominable catchpenny'. Among other works, Lewes published The Catch Club: A Collection of Songs (1787), The London Songster containing 450 songs, duets and cantatas given at public theatres and gardens, John Hippisley’s Drunken Man, as altered by Charles Lee Lewes and William Cowper’s John Gilpin, as delivered by Charles Lee Lewes.

This period saw the rise of interest in the work of the European physiognomists Charles Lebrun (1619-1690) and Johann Kasper Lavater (1741-1801) which had great influence upon the arts of the 18thc in general. The portraitist George Romney was an enthusiast, as may be seen in his Infant Shakespeare and the Passions (Royal Shakespeare Company) which composition presents a range of human facial expressions. The study of physiognomy was also of interest to actors, who studied the engravings as they strove for authenticity of attitude, gesture and facial expression representing a gamut of emotions on stage. Part of the success of David Garrick (1717-1779) was his ability to deploy his remarkable facial musculature. Indeed, this skill had been of great interest as early as the late 16thc to Giambattista Della Porta (1535-1616), the Italian polymath and playwright. Entertainers in London then exploited this public interest, so following the popular success of A Lecture on Heads, written and performed from 1764 by the actor George Alexander Stevens (1710-1780), which parodied physiognomy, Lewes jumped on the bandwaggon. Having purchased ‘all the whimsical apparatus’ from Stevens, he published and performed his own version of the text, also called A Lecture on Heads (1st edn 1784), prudently waiting four years after the death of his predecessor. In the show he presented sixty distinct characters and his own book ran into numerous editions, some of which appeared long after his death.  One acknowledges Stevens as the source of the idea: A lecture on heads by George Alexander Stevens with additions by Mr Pilon as delivered by Mr Charles Lee Lewes with forty seven heads by Nesbit (1821). It is not entirely clear whether the grotesque faces were all in facsimile or whether Lewes pulled some of them himself, as he spoke. A related venture involved full length human figures ‘painted in transparencies’ and entitled Nature’s Looking Glass.

Marriage and family life

As might be expected, Lewes's domestic life was rather complicated and is now, for the first time, largely disintangled. He was married three times and had issue from two marriages. His first wife was Anne Hussey (1741-1772), an actress, whom he married in London in 1763 and they had a son John Lee (1764-1772) and a daughter Elizabeth Anne, baptised at St Paul's, Covent Garden in 1771. Anne and both her children died at Bristol in 1772, probably from a shared infection. In 1775 he married Fanny Wrigley (1748-1782), the daughter of James Wrigley (or Rigley), a Liverpool innkeeper of Ye Hole in Ye Wall, Dale Street, a pub built in 1726 and perhaps the oldest in the city. They had two sons John Lee Lewes (1776-1831) and James Wrigley Lewes (1781-1819).  

After his second wife's death in 1783 Charles Lee Lewes married in Edinburgh in 1787, Catharine Maria O’Neal, another actress, who died in the city in 1796. She had performed there Lady Macbeth opposite John Kemble. There is an engraving of her by Samuel de Wilde (1748-1832) showing her in the part of Lady Sadlife in The Double Gallant by Coller Cibber (1761-1757) published in 1792.  Mrs and Mrs Lewes played together in The Road to Ruin, a prophetic and somewhat ironic production with Charles as Goldfinch and his wife as Widow Warren. This production was captured by the artist John Kay, who produced an engraving of the couple. There were no children of this marriage.

His son with Anne Hussey, John Lee Lewes, was a minor literary figure who published two volumes of poetry and edited his late father's Memoirs of 1805. Also living in Liverpool between 1803 and 1811, he married Elizabeth Pownell, by whom he had four children: John (b.1803), Frances (b.1804), Elizabeth (b. 1806) and James (b.1808) who were all baptised at St Nicholas's Church, in the city. In this period John's occupation was variously given as Gentleman and Captain in the 3rd Lancashire Militia. He was apparently known as ‘Dandy’ Lewes which suggests he was somewhat flamboyant, like his father.

However, by 1811 he had left this legitimate family to start an illegitimate one with Elizabeth Ashweek (1787-1870), a young woman from a Devonshire family. This is an unusual name but there was a John Ashweek, tobacco pipe maker, in Plymouth in the mid 19thc. John and Elizabeth had three illegitimate sons: Edgar James (1808-1830), who was buried in Porto, Portugal; Edward Charles (1813-1855), a surgeon in London, who married Susanna Georgiana Pittock in 1846; and George Henry Lewes (1817-1878; ODNB), the Victorian writer and critic and companion of the novelist ‘George Eliot’, whose real name was Marian Evans (1819-1880; ODNB). Having fathered these three illegitimate sons their father John Lee Lewes vanished from their lives and in 1823 Elizabeth married Captain John Gurens Willim of the 18th Bengal Infantry Regiment who was probably a better role model. John Lee Lewes emigrated to join his younger brother James Wrigley Lewes (1781-1819) in Bermuda as a customs officer but in 1827 the governor of Bermuda, probably Sir John Hope (c.1684-1766) appointed him as the registrar of slaves on the island, where he died. He was apparently married twice and one of his daughters by one of these marriages became the first or second wife of the actor Richard Wilson (1744-1796) whom she married at St Mary's, Whitechapel in 1791.

John’s third son, George Henry Lewes married in 1841 Agnes (1822-1902), eldest daughter of Swynfen Stevens Jervis (1797-1867) MP, JP, DL, of Darlaston and Chatcull, Staffordshire.  It seems that he might have been tutor to the Jervis sons. Amongst their children were Charles Lewes (1842-1891), a civil servant, who was also a London county councillor. He married Gertrude Hill (1837-1923) at Hampstead in 1865, the sister of Octavia Hill (1838-1912), the campaigner and co-founder of the National Trust. George and Gertrude had three daughters; Blanche Southwood Lewes (1872-1964) who married in 1903 Reginald John Edward Hanson, a London surgeon; Maud Southwood Lewes (1874-1942) who married in 1904 John Rowland Hopwood, a London solicitor; and Elinor Southwood Lewes (1877-1974) who married in 1903 Ernest Carrington Ouvrey, also a London solicitor. Their parents, George and Agnes, later separated but were never divorced, hence the inability of G. H. Lewes to marry George Eliot. 

Death and burial

Charles Lee Lewes closed his career by speaking an address written by T. J. Dibdin (1771-1841), the dramatist and songwriter, entitled Lee Lewes's Ultimatum, which proved a financial success, but Lewes had little time to enjoy its proceeds. In his Reminiscences Dibdin wrote that Lewes was found dead in his bed on 26 June 1803, two days after his benefit. In his pocket were two guineas labelled ‘for Dibdin’, intended as the return of a loan made two days earlier. He added that Lewes ‘ate a hearty supper with his brother Charles Dibdin at Sir Hugh Middleton’s Head on the last night of his existence.’ Fittingly for Lewes, this pub where he had lodgings was also the home of Deacon’s Music Hall. However Dibdin’s memory was incorrect as James Boaden (1762-1839), the biographer, dramatist and journalist, in his Life of Mrs Jordan, together with two other sources, all say that Lewes died almost a month later on the 23 July 1803. He had survived his three wives and was buried in Pardon burial ground, Pentonville, Islington in London and the burial register again confirms Lewes’ death on the 23 July.

Sources

  • ancestry.com
  • Ashton, Rosemary, G. H. Lewes; a Life, Oxford, 1991
  • www.electricscotland.com  Kay’s Edinburgh Portraits
  • Genest, John, Some account of the English Stage 1660-1830 (in 10 vols), London, 1832
  • Highfill, Philip, and others, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and other Stage Personnel in London , 1660-1800, 1973
  • Hudleston, C. Roy (1905-1992), FSA, the genealogist, did a great deal research into the Wingfield and Whinfield families
  • Information from the Theatre Museum in London to the author in 1975 and 1995
  • Lewes, Charles Lee, ed. John Lee Lewes, Memoirs of Charles Lee Lewes, 4 vols, London, 1805
  • www.londonstagedatabase
  • Montgomery-Massingberd, Hugh, ed. Burke's Landed Gentry, 18th edition, vol.3, pp. 496-497 (for Jervis), London, 1972
  • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on George Lee Lewes
  • Wikipedia entry on George Lee Lewes