Stephen, Leslie

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STEPHEN, LESLIE

STEPHEN, LESLIE (1832–1904), English writer.

Known to many as the father of the novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Leslie Stephen was one of the two or three most eminent Victorian men of letters. A noted Alpinist, a writer, a literary critic, a historian of ideas, an eloquent apologist for agnosticism, and a biographer, he was also an editor, both of the Cornhill Magazine and of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography. Born of Evangelical parents, he was educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he remained as Tutor from 1854 to 1862, when, having lost his faith, he resigned his tutorship and two years later left Cambridge for London to launch his career as a writer. In his Cambridge years he established himself as a noted rowing coach, as a conqueror of such formidable Alpine peaks as the Schreckhorn, and, in 1863, having crossed the Atlantic to visit the battlefields of the U.S. Civil War.

Radical in politics and freethinking in religious matters, he was an outspoken member of like-minded young men who denounced the established Church of England and the Tory Party as obstacles to progress and campaigned for national education, parliamentary reform, and the disestablishment of the church. Married to Harriet (Minny) Thackeray in 1867, he earned his living by writing for the Saturday Review, the Pall Mall Gazette, and contributing literary articles to the Cornhill Magazine of which he became editor in 1871. In that same year he published a collection of his much admired Alpine essays, The Playground of Europe. As editor of the Cornhill he not only published such writers as Thomas Hardy, Henry James, R. L. Stevenson, and Matthew Arnold, but also contributed his own distinguished literary essays, ultimately published as Hours in a Library (1874–1879; 1892).

Meanwhile, for the Fortnightly Review and Frasier's Magazine, he was firing off deliberately infidel essays that appeared as Essays in Freethinking and Plainspeaking (1873), the final essay of which is a manifesto calling for liberation from religious dogma and proclaiming the exhilaration of free thought. More such essays appeared during the 1870s, some made poignantly eloquent by his grief at the sudden death of Minny in 1875. These essays eventually appeared in his unapologetic Agnostic's Apology (1893). His most significant work in this decade, however, was History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), his masterpiece in intellectual history, notable for his pioneer assertion (in England) that the history of ideas could not be written without showing how the social context shaped and determined ideas, not vice versa. Ideas took hold or were let go when they fit or did not fit the needs of human beings, a theory, Darwinian in imagery, that could be called historical naturalism, as distinct from historical materialism, which it resembles. More exemplary of his theory is his long delayed sequel, The English Utilitarians (1900), and, especially luminous, his smaller masterpiece English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904), a seedbed from which have sprouted a large number of specialized studies.

How can morality survive without theology? To show the independence of morality on theology, Stephen wrote The Science of Ethics (1882). Most philosophers have found it wanting as ethics, but in the late twentieth century it had a better press as Peter Allan Dale and others recognized that Stephen anticipates the work of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber in displaying the social roots of moral codes. Likewise, the human being can be truly seen only within the social context. This is his way of writing such biographies as Life of Henry Fawcett (1884) and The Life of James Fitzjames Stephen (1895), less so perhaps in his English Men of Letters lives of Johnson (1878), Pope (1880), Swift (1882), and George Eliot (1902). However, as the creator and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography from 1882 to 1891, he held both his writers and himself to an unmatched standard of concise and purposeful articulation of fact and produced an invaluable resource, not supplanted for a century, and for which he was knighted in 1903.

After retirement he spent his final years writing the essays (some of his best in fact) contained in his Studies of a Biographer (1898–1902) and the lectures collected in Social Rights and Duties (1896), as well as major works mentioned above. Then came a sort of autobiography, a poignant and revealing document, written to assuage his grief at the death of his second wife, Julia, in 1895, read by his descendants and biographers, but not published until 1977 as The Mausoleum Book. Leslie Stephen died of cancer on 22 February 1904.

See alsoIntellectuals.