Sir George Cornewall Lewis: Statesman and ‘New Philologist’

Rebecca Posner
Oxford University
Summary

George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863) was a Liberal statesman who attained high office, but whose interest in the ‘new philology’ was maintained throughout his life, although he also wrote extensively on politics and history. His most interesting philological work is an Essay on the For- mation of the Romance Languages (1835) which predates the more famous 4-volume Grammar, by Friedrich Diez (1794–1876), which appeared during 1836–1844, and which advances the hypothesis that a creolization process was responsible for the change of Latin to Romance, rejecting as unsubstantiated Diez’s suggestion that a popular Latin was at the origin of the Romance languages. Lewis’s work on Romance is placed in the context of the development of the study of modern languages at Oxford University, and of the ‘new philology’ which was gaining ground in intellectual circles in 19th-century Britain.

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