Stephen, Sir Leslie (1832–1904), son of Sir J.
Stephen and brother of Sir J. F.
Stephen, was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he became tutor, having taken orders. From his family he inherited a strong tradition of evangelicalism and muscular Christianity, and he became a noted mountaineer: he edited the
Alpine Journal, 1868–72, and the best of his Alpine essays were collected in
The Playground of Europe (1871).
Stephen's reading of J. S.
Mill,
Comte, and
Kant inclined him to scepticism, and by 1865 he had abandoned all belief. In 1864 he came to London and embarked on a literary career of prodigious industry and output, contributing articles to many periodicals. He was editor of the
Cornhill (1871–82), then he became editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography. His great work,
History of English Thought in the 18th Century (1876), reviews the Deist controversy of that age, and the intuitional and utilitarian schools of philosophy. He also contributed several biographies to the English Men of Letters series and almost 400 entries to the
DNB. His last important volume was
English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904). He was one of the most prominent intellectuals of his day (portrayed by his friend
Meredith as Vernon Whitford in
The Egoist).
Stephen's first wife was
Thackeray's daughter ‘Minny’, who died in 1875. His acute grief, and his second marriage to Julia Duckworth, are both recorded in his autobiographical papers, written for his children by Julia (one of whom was V.
Woolf) and step-children and published in 1977 (ed. A. Bell) as
Mausoleum Book. Woolf portrays some aspects of his character in her portrait of Mr Ramsay in
To the Lighthouse (1927).
