Matthew G. Lewis
1775–1818 · England
he wrote the century's great scandal at nineteen
Lewis wrote The Monk in ten weeks at nineteen, while serving as an attaché at The Hague, and published it in 1796. It was a sensation and then a scandal — an accusation of blasphemy, a threatened prosecution, and an expurgated edition with the worst of it cut. He was known as Monk Lewis for the remaining twenty-two years of his life, and never wrote anything that competed with it. Walter Scott, who liked him, described him as small and boyish, with strange protruding eyes.
He sat in Parliament for six years and did very little. Then, in 1812, he inherited his father's sugar estates in Jamaica, and with them several hundred enslaved people.
What he did next is genuinely difficult. He sailed to Jamaica twice, in 1815 and 1817, to see the estates himself; he reduced punishments, improved conditions and recorded what he found in a journal published after his death. He also did not free anyone. He remained a slave owner who wanted to be a decent one, which is not a thing that exists.
He caught yellow fever on the voyage home in 1818 and was buried at sea.