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Leslie Stephen

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Sir Leslie Stephen
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(born Nov. 28, 1832, London, Eng. — died Feb. 22, 1904, London) English critic and man of letters. After attending Eton College and Cambridge University, he gained entry to literary circles and in 1871 began an 11-year tenure as editor of The Cornhill Magazine, for which he wrote literary criticism. His greatest learned work was his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), but his most enduring legacy is the Dictionary of National Biography, which he edited from 1882 to 1891, personally writing many hundreds of its meticulous articles. He was the father of Virginia Woolf and the painter Vanessa Bell (1879 – 1961).

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Biography: Sir Leslie Stephen
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The English historian, critic, and editor Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) was one of the great popularizers of Victorian thought and literature.

Leslie Stephen was born in London on Nov. 28, 1832, the son of Sir James Stephen, a leading Evangelical and distinguished undersecretary in the Colonial Office. By birth and education Leslie was a member of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy, and his upbringing was typical of his class and time. Educated at Eton and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he first determined on an academic career, which required his entry into Anglican orders. He was ordained deacon in 1855 and priest in 1859. A few years later, in a typically Victorian intellectual crisis which led him to religious doubt as a result of his reading of the works of J. S. Mill, he resigned his Cambridge fellowship and in 1867 began a literary career.

The whole of Stephen's outlook for the rest of his life was shaped by this early crisis. Increasingly he came under Darwinian influences and moved steadily toward agnosticism. In 1875 he resigned his priesthood. His first and most important work, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., 1876), revealed the full scale of his agnostic values and assumptions. For Stephen, with his strong Evangelical background, the great goal of 19th-century philosophy was to preserve the ethics of theism in an increasingly nontheistic world. Between 1878 and 1882 he wrote a work of philosophical synthesis which he hoped would win him a reputation as a major thinker by putting the traditional ethics on a scientific base of utilitarianism and Darwinism. The work, entitled The Science of Ethics (1882), was such a failure that it permanently altered Stephen's career and caused him to devote the rest of his life to high-level journalism and editing.

From 1882 to 1889 Stephen was editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and during this time 26 volumes appeared; he also contributed 378 biographical articles. He produced, in addition to a number of lesser works, two substantial studies, The English Utilitarians (1900) and English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, which was published on the day of his death, Feb. 22, 1904.

Stephen was neither a great thinker nor an original scholar. His writings, though often lucid and intelligent, were Victorian period pieces which reveal as much about the author and the age in which he lived as they do about their subjects.

Further Reading

The fullest biography is still Frederic W. Maitland's happy memoir, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906). Noel G. Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (1952), is an intellectual biography. A brief consideration of Stephen as historian is Sidney A. Burrell's essay, "Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904)" in Herman Ausubel and others, eds., Some Modern Historians of Britain (1951).

Additional Sources

Annan, Noel Gilroy Annan, Baron, Leslie Stephen, New York:Arno Press, 1977.

Annan, Noel Gilroy Annan, Baron, Leslie Stephen: the Godless Victorian, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 1984.

Annan, Noel Gilroy Annan, Baron, Leslie Stephen, his thought and character in relation to his time, New York: AMS Press, 1977.

MacCarthy, Desmond, Leslie Stephen, Philadelphia, Pa.: R. West, 1978.

Philosophy Dictionary: Leslie Stephen
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Stephen, Leslie (1832-1904) English man of letters and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Stephen's main philosophical work was his Science of Ethics (1882), an evolutionary ethics, but he also wrote extensively in the history of ideas, including History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) and English Utilitarianism (1900). He was the father of Virginia Woolf, who portrayed him as Mr Ramsey in To the Lighthouse.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Sir Leslie Stephen
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Stephen, Sir Leslie, 1832-1904, English author and critic. The first serious critic of the novel, he was also editor of the great Dictionary of National Biography from its beginning in 1882 until 1891. In 1859 he was ordained a minister. As a tutor at Cambridge his philosophical readings led him to skepticism, and later he relinquished his holy orders. He wrote several essays defending his agnostic position, notably Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873). He moved from Cambridge to London in 1864 and three years later married Harriet Marian, younger daughter of Thackeray. Some of the essays and sketches Stephen wrote for various periodicals were collected in Hours in a Library (1874-79). From 1871 to 1882 he was editor of Cornhill Magazine; during this time he encouraged such authors as Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James. Throughout his life Stephen was a prominent athlete and mountaineer. He wrote numerous articles on the subject of mountain climbing, many of which were collected in The Playground of Europe (1871). His major works include History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876); biographies of Johnson (1878), Pope (1880), Swift (1882), George Eliot (1902), and Hobbes (1904), all written for the "English Men of Letters" series; Science of Ethics (1882), which attempted to combine ethics with Darwin's theory of evolution; Studies of a Biographer (1898-1902); and The English Utilitarians (1900). Virginia Woolf was the younger of his two daughters by his second wife, Julia Jackson.

Bibliography

See biography by F. W. Maitland (1906, repr. 1968); studies by N. G. Annan (1951) and D. D. Zink (1972).

Quotes By: Leslie Stephen
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Quotes:

"Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is doing a public service."

Wikipedia: Leslie Stephen
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Leslie Stephen (c. 1860)

Sir Leslie Stephen, KCB (28 November 1832 – 22 February 1904) was an English author, critic and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

Contents

Life

Stephen was born at Kensington Gore in London, the brother of James Fitzjames Stephen and son of Sir James Stephen. 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. After studying 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, Stephen remained for several years a fellow and tutor of his college.[1] 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 Smith, he had been introduced by his brother. It was at Smith's house at Hampstead that Stephen met his first wife, Harriet Marion (1840 - 1875), daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, with whom he had a daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870 - 1945); after her death he married Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846 - 1895), widow of Herbert Duckworth. By her, he was the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

Literary career

Leslie Stephen (1902)
by George Charles Beresford

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 History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876 and 1881) and The Science of Ethics (1882); the second of these was extensively adopted as a textbook on the subject. The first was generally recognized as an important addition to philosophical literature and led immediately to Stephen's election at the Athenaeum Club in 1877.

Stephen also served as the first editor (1885–91) of the Dictionary of National Biography.

Mountaineering

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 1865–1868.

Works

  • The Playground of Europe (1871)
  • Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873)
  • The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876)
  • Hours in a Library (1874-79)
  • The Science of Ethics (1882)
  • An Agnostic's Apology (1893)
  • The Utilitarians (1900)
  • Studies of a Biographer (1907)
  • Biographies of Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, George Eliot and Thomas Hobbes

References

  1. ^ Stephen, Leslie in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Philosophy Dictionary. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Copyright © 1994, 1996, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Leslie Stephen".  Read more