Congreve, Richard (1818-1899)

Richard Congreve was a former Oxford fellow who became the head of English Positivism, Comte's appointed leader of his British followers. Eliot's friendship was with his much younger wife, Maria, whom she had known in Coventry through Maria's father, Dr. Bury, the family physician. They met again as neighbours at Wandsworth in 1859. Richard entered the circle through Maria. He appears in Eliot's 75 letters to her as a subject, never as a correspondent, and his own dealings with Lewes were few and formal. Eliot attended his positivist lectures and read the Comte he lent her. She also consulted him on the medical detail of Lydgate in Middlemarch, since he had studied medicine and joined the Royal College of Physicians in 1866. The Leweses helped fund his positivist work. Lewes had popularised Comte in England before Congreve, but he kept his distance from the Religion of Humanity, while Congreve embraced the whole system, ritual included. When Eliot married John Cross in 1880, she did not tell the Congreves beforehand because their principles opposed remarriage, and Charles Lewes had to explain the "great, momentous change." The friendship held all the same. Her last letter to Maria was written from her new house on 6 December 1880, sixteen days before her death.

George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett, https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org

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Richard Congreve (1818-1899), Congreve, Richard (1818-1899), Social Network Gallery, George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett, https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed November 11, 2026. https://www.georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/97156