Leslie Stephen

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Template:Short description Template:Distinguish Template:EngvarB Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox person Sir Leslie Stephen Template:Post-nominals (28 November 1832 – 22 February 1904) was an English author, critic, historian, biographer, mountaineer, and an Ethical movement activist. He was also the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the founder of England's Dictionary of National Biography.

Life

Sir Leslie Stephen came from a distinguished intellectual family,Template:Sfn and was born at a house on Kensington Gore, later 42 Hyde Park Gate, in London, the son of Sir James Stephen and his wife, Jane Catherine (Template:Nee Venn).Template:Sfn His father was Colonial Undersecretary of State and a noted abolitionist.Template:Sfn He was the fourth of five children, his siblings including James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–1894) and Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834–1909).Template:Sfn

His family had belonged to the Clapham Sect, the early 19th-century group of mainly evangelical Christian social reformers. At his father's house, he saw a good deal of the Macaulays, James Spedding, Sir Henry Taylor and Nassau Senior. Leslie Stephen was educated at Eton College, King's College London and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. (20th wrangler) in 1854 and M.A. in 1857. He was elected a fellow of Trinity Hall in 1854 and became a junior tutor in 1856.Template:Sfn

In 1859, he was ordained, but his study of philosophy, together with his perception of the religious controversies surrounding the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin, led to his losing his faith in 1862, and in 1864 he resigned from his positions at Cambridge, and moved to London. He recounted some of his experiences in a chapter in his Life of Fawcett as well as in some less formal Sketches from Cambridge: By a Don (1865). These sketches were reprinted from The Pall Mall Gazette, to the proprietor of which, George Murray Smith, he had been introduced by his brother.Template:Sfn

Marriage

(1) Harriet (Minny) Thackeray 1867–1875

Harriet and Leslie Stephen, 1867
Harriet's grave, Kensal Green Cemetery

The family connections included that of William Makepeace Thackeray. His brother, Fitzjames had been a friend of Thackeray's and assisted in the disposition of his estate when he died in 1863. His sister Caroline met Thackeray's daughters, Anny (1837–1919) and Minny (1840–1875) when they were mutual guests of Julia Margaret Cameron (of whom, see later). This led to an invitation to visit from Leslie Stephen's mother, Lady Stephen, where the sisters met him. They also met at George Murray Smith's house at Hampstead. Minny and Leslie became engaged on 4 December 1866 and married on 19 June 1867.

After the wedding, they travelled to the Swiss Alps and Northern Italy, and on return to England lived at the Thackeray sisters' home at 16 Onslow Gardens with Anny, who was a novelist. In the spring of 1868 Minny miscarried but recovered sufficiently for the couple to tour the eastern United States. Minny miscarried again in 1869, but became pregnant again in 1870 and on 7 December gave birth to their daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870–1945). Laura was premature, weighing three pounds. In March 1873, Thackeray and the Stephens moved to 8 Southwell Gardens.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The couple travelled extensively, and by the summer of 1875, Minny was pregnant again, but this time in poor health. She went to the Alps and came back slightly better, but got back pains by OctoberTemplate:NdashNovember. On the evening of 27 November, she went to bed, fell into convulsions, and died the following day of eclampsia.<ref>Template:Harvnb: "Pregnant in the summer of 1875 and feeling unwell, Minny went to the Alps and returned someTemplate:Shywhat improved, but by October and November she was complaining of back pains and during the evening of the 27th went to bed, fell into conTemplate:ShyvulTemplate:Shysions and died of eclampsia the next day."</ref>

After Minny's death, Leslie Stephen continued to live with Anny, but they moved to 11 Hyde Park Gate South in 1876, next door to her widowed friend and collaborator, Julia Duckworth. Leslie Stephen and his daughter were also cared for by his sister, the writer Caroline Emelia Stephen, although Leslie described her as "Silly Milly" and her books as "little works".<ref name="lewis">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Harvnb: “I had a perhaps rather pedantic mania for correcting Template:Nowrap flights of iTemplate:ShymaTemplate:ShygiTemplate:ShynaTemplate:Shytion and checking her exuberant impulses. Template:Nowrap and Template:Nowrap used to call me the cold bath from my habit of drenching Anny’s little schemes and fancies with chilling criticism”</ref><ref>Template:Harvnb: "Apparently, however, he did not sufficiently reTemplate:ShycogTemplate:Shynise the effect his self-indulgent, violent language had on others; his sister Milly could hardly bear them."</ref> Meanwhile, Anny was falling in love with her younger cousin Richmond Ritchie, to Leslie Stephen's consternation. Ritchie became a constant visitor and they became engaged in May 1877 and were married on 2 August. At the same time, Leslie Stephen was seeing more and more of Julia Duckworth.

(2) Julia Duckworth 1878–1895

Julia Duckworth by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1872

Template:See also His second marriage was to Julia Prinsep Duckworth (née Jackson, 1846–1895). Julia had been born in India and after returning to England she became a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones.<ref>Smith College libraries biography of Julia Prinsep Stephen</ref> In 1867, she had married Herbert Duckworth (1833 − 1870) by whom she had three children prior to his death in 1870.

Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth were married on 26 March 1878. They had four children:

In May 1895, Julia died of influenza, leaving her husband with four young children aged 11 to 15 (her children by her first marriage being adults by then).Template:Sfn

Career

In the 1850s, Stephen and his brother James were invited by Frederick Denison Maurice to lecture at The Working Men's College. Leslie Stephen became a member of the college's governing College Corporation.<ref name=Harrison>J. F. C. Harrison, A History of the Working Men's College (1854–1954), Routledge Kegan Paul (1954)</ref>

Stephen was an honorary fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and received the honorary degree Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) from the University of Cambridge and from the University of Oxford (November 1901<ref>Template:Cite newspaper The Times</ref>). While at Cambridge, Stephen became an Anglican clergyman. In 1865, having renounced his religious beliefs, and after a visit to the United States two years earlier, where he had formed lasting friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton, he settled in London and became a journalist, eventually editing The Cornhill Magazine in 1871 where R. L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, W. E. Norris, Henry James, and James Payn figured among his contributors.

In his spare time, he participated in athletics and mountaineering. He also contributed to the Saturday Review, Fraser, Macmillan, the Fortnightly, and other periodicals. He was already known as a climber, as a contributor to Peaks, Passes and Glaciers (1862), and as one of the earliest presidents of the Alpine Club, when, in 1871, in commemoration of his own first ascents in the Alps, he published The Playground of Europe, which immediately became a mountaineering classic, drawing—together with Whymper's Scrambles Amongst the Alps — successive generations of its readers to the Alps.

During the eleven years of his editorship, in addition to three volumes of critical studies, he made two valuable contributions to philosophical history and theory. The first was The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876 and 1881). This work was generally recognised as an important addition to philosophical literature and led immediately to Stephen's election at the Athenaeum Club in 1877. The second was The Science of Ethics (1882). It was extensively adopted as a textbook on the subject and made him the best-known proponent of evolutionary ethics in late-nineteenth-century Britain. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1901.<ref>American Antiquarian Society Members Directory</ref>

Leslie Stephen also served as the first editor (1885–91) of the Dictionary of National Biography. He was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 1902 Coronation Honours list published on 26 June 1902.<ref>Template:Cite newspaper The Times</ref><ref>Template:London Gazette</ref>

Beliefs

As an adult, Stephen was an agnostic atheist who wrote extensively about his views. In Social Rights and Duties (1896), he explained how he came to lose his faith of his parents: "When I ceased to accept the teaching of my youth, it was not so much a process of giving up beliefs as of discovering that I never really believed."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> His second wife, Julia, was similarly activist in her writings on agnosticism.

He advocated for more people of this view to claim the label "agnostic" for themselves, eschewing the harder associations of the unadorned term "atheist", reflecting the fact that no one who claims disbelief in gods does so on the basis of professing absolute knowledge about the universe. He concluded his essay "An Agnostic's Apology" with a reply to religious critics who hold atheists and agnostics in contempt:

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Stephen was very involved in the organised Ethical movement. He served multiple terms as President of the West London Ethical Society (part of the Union of Ethical Societies).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He gave numerous addresses and lectures to the ethical society during his tenure as president, which are collected at length across multiple volumes of writings. He was an active organiser in the movement, and in one lecture, entitled "The aims of ethical societies", set about the task of defining the broader social purpose which animated the wider Ethical movement at that time.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Mountaineering

Leslie Stephen painted by George Frederic Watts, 1878.

Stephen was one of the most prominent figures in the golden age of alpinism (the period between Wills's ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 and Whymper's ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865) during which many major alpine peaks saw their first ascents. Joining the Alpine Club in 1857 (the year of its formation), Stephen made the first ascent, usually in the company of his favourite Swiss guide Melchior Anderegg, of the following peaks:

He was President of the Alpine Club from 1865 to 1868 and edited the Alpine Journal, 1868–1872.

List of selected publications

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Death

Leslie Stephen's grave, Highgate Cemetery

He died in Kensington and is buried in the eastern section of Highgate Cemetery in the raised section alongside the northern path. His daughter, Virginia Woolf, was badly affected by his death and she was cared for by his sister, Caroline.<ref name=lewis/> Woolf in 1927 created a detailed psychological portrait of him in the fictional character of Mr. Ramsay in her classic novel, To the Lighthouse, (as well as of her mother as Mrs. Ramsay). (Ref: The Diaries and Letters of Virginia Woolf) His probate is worded: STEPHEN sir Leslie of 22 Hyde Park-gate Middlesex K.C.B. probate London 23 March to George Herbert Duckworth and Gerald de L'Etang Duckworth esquires Effects £15715 6s. 6d.Template:Sfn

To honour his memory, his friends held a lecture in 1907 at the University of Cambridge, which has been held bi-annually as the Leslie Stephen Lecture since. His friends endowed that it be held with the specification that it be on "some literary subject, including therein criticism, biography and ethics."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Family tree

For family trees of the Stephens, Thackerays and Jacksons, see Bicknell (1996a)Template:Sfn and Bloom and Maynard (1994).Template:Sfn

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References

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Bibliography

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Websites

Anne Thackeray Ritchie

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External images

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