Author: Lewes, John Lee
Biography:
LEWES, John Lee (1776-1831: ODNB)
The son of Charles Lee Lewes (1740-1803) and his wife Fanny Wrigley (1751-83), he was baptised in London at St. Pancras Old Church on 19 May 1776. Nothing is known of his education, but he was sufficiently well educated to prepare the Memoirs of his father, an actor, for publication in 3 or 4 vols. in 1804. By 1799 he was a Second Lieutenant in the 3rd Regiment of the Royal Lancashire militia. On 1 Jan. 1800 he married Elizabeth Pownall (b 1783), a minor, with her father’s permission at St. Thomas’s, Liverpool. They had six children, the last of them born in Liverpool in 1812. However, with Elizabeth Ashweek (b 1786) whom he never married, Lewes also had a second family of three sons born between 1807 and 1817. The youngest son was the writer George Henry Lewes (1817-78), who may never have known about his illegitimacy and grew up with a stepfather. Lewes’s military connections are on display in the subscription list for his National Melodies, which contains both army and naval officers and is dedicated to Captain Colquitt RN. The Duke of Marlborough took four copies. The author promises an anthology of similar songs if the collection should be successful, but no such sequel appeared. About 1819 Lewes abandoned both families and went to Bermuda, where one of his brothers had been a customs officer but died there in 1819. Lewes himself returned to Lancashire, where he died in lodgings on the London Road of “paralysis,” aged 54, and was buried on 12 Feb. 1831 at Everton, his burial registered as “non-conformist or non-parochial.” (“Lewes, George Henry,” ODNB 10 Jan. 2024; ancestry.com 10 Jan. 2024; findmypast.com 10 Jan. 2024; London Chronicle 15 Dec. 1804)