Stephen, Leslie, 1832-1904

English critic and philosopher.

Stephen was a British critic, man of letters and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.

Sir Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, was an English literary editor, literary critic, essayist, and biographer.

Epithet: K.C.B.; author

Sir Leslie Stephen was an English author, editor, critic, and man of letters, known for his years as editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Born in London to an aristocratic family, he was educated at Cambridge, where he became an Anglican clergyman; he then became a journalist and editor of Cornhill Magazine, while contributing articles to numerous periodicals and publishing several books. In 1882, he became the first editor of the landmark Dictionary of National Biography, and his influence on the project was enormous. An ardent mountain climber, he was also the father of novelist Virginia Woolf and artist Vanessa Bell.

English critic, philosopher and biographer.

British author, philosopher, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.

English biographer, literary critic, and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography from 1882-1891.

British author, philosopher, and first editor of the Dictionary of national biography.

English man of letters.

Biographer, author and father of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.

Biographer, author, compiler of the Dictionary of National Biography, and father of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.

English author, literary critic and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.

Son of Jane Catherine Venn and Sir James Stephen. He was born November 28, 1832, in London, and he died February 22, 1904, in London.

English critic, man of letters, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.

A member of a distinguished intellectual family, Stephen was educated at Eton, at King's College, London and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was elected to a fellowship in 1854 and became junior tutor in 1856. He was ordained in 1859, but his philosophical studies, combined probably with the controversy that followed the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), caused him to loose his faith; in 1862 he resigned his tutorship and two years later left Cambridge to live in London.

Through his brother, James Fitzjames Stephen, a contributor to the Saturday Review, Stephen gained entry to the literary world, contributing to many periodicals. In 1871 George Smith offered him the editorship of The Cornhill Magazine, for which he wrote literary criticism later republished in the three series of Hours in a Library (1874-1879). Stephen was one of the first serious critics of the novel, and his works still deserves considerations by the historians of literary criticism. Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edmund Gosse, and Henry James were among those whom Stephen, as an editor, encouraged. After eleven years he resigned from the editorship of Cornhill, but he continued to write for periodicals.

His greatest learned work was his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876). His philosophical study The English Utilitarians (1900) was somewhat less successful, though it is still a useful source. His philosophical contribution to the rationalist tradition, Science of Ethics (1882), attempted to wed evolutionary theory to ethics. Stephen's most enduring legacy, however, is the Dictionary of National Biography, which he edited from 1882 to 1891. He edited the first 26 volumes and contributed 378 biographies to that important reference work. In recognition of this service to letters he was created Knight Commander of the Bath in 1902 and received other honours. Stephen's English Literature and Society in the Eighteen Century (1904) was a pioneer work in the sociological study of literature.

Stephen was shy and given to silence, the more so after the death in 1875 of his first wife, Harriet Marian, the second daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray. In 1878 he married Julia Jackson, the widow of Herbert Duckworth, and among their four children were painter Vanessa Bell and the novelist Virginia Woolf. Noel G. Annan's Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (1952; reprinted, Walter P. Metzger, ed., 1977) is a notable study. Sir Leslie Stephen's Mausoleum Book (1978), edited by Alan Bell, is an autobiography written after the death of Stephen's wife Julia in 1895.

From "Stephen, Sir Leslie." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2003.

Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 30 May, 2003