The ideas of the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) have shaped evolutionary theory, philosophy of science, sociology and politics. He was a colossus of the Victorian age, and his works ranked alongside those of Darwin and Marx in the development of disciplines as wide ranging as sociology, anthropology, political theory, philosophy and psychology. His unique system of knowledge, which bridged the gap between empiricism and metaphysics, offered modern and scientific answers to questions about the meaning of life and made him a world philosopher of the late nineteenth century. In this major new study of Spencer, the first for over thirty years, Mark Francis provides an authoritative and meticulously researched intellectual biography of one of the giants of the Victorian age. Using archival material and contemporary printed sources, Francis creates a fascinating portrait of a human being whose philosophical and scientific system was a unique attempt to explain modern life in all its biological, psychological and sociological forms. European thinkers had often aspired to systematize knowledge, but Spencer was the only English figure to do so. Yet the grandeur of his scientific account of the universe was not underpinned by a successful personal life. Francis reveals how Spencer felt permanently crippled by the Christian values he had absorbed during childhood, and was incapable of romantic love, as he was during his relationship with the novelist George Eliot. Francis shows that this schism between a failed personal life and his own triumphant account of human progress forced Spencer into the role of a futuristic prophet. Although there was no solace for him, he could gift new generations with knowledge that would help them avoid distress and pain. "Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life" fills what is perhaps the last big biographical gap in Victorian history. An exceptional work of scholarship, it not only dispels the plethora of misinformation