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Sir Leslie Stephen (28 November 1832 – 22 February 1904) was an English author, critic, historian, biographer, mountaineer, and an Ethical Culture activist. He was also the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the founder of England's Dictionary of National Biography.
His family had belonged to the Clapham Sect, the early 19th-century group of mainly evangelicalism Christian . At his father's house, he saw a good deal of the Zachary Macaulay, 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.
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.
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. 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 OctoberNovember. On the evening of 27 November, she went to bed, fell into convulsions, and died the following day of eclampsia.: "Pregnant in the summer of 1875 and feeling unwell, Minny went to the Alps and returned somewhat improved, but by October and November she was complaining of back pains and during the evening of the 27th went to bed, fell into convulsions and died of eclampsia the next day."
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".: “I had a perhaps rather pedantic mania for correcting flights of imagination and checking her exuberant impulses. and used to call me the cold bath from my habit of drenching Anny’s little schemes and fancies with chilling criticism”: "Apparently, however, he did not sufficiently recognise the effect his self-indulgent, violent language had on others; his sister Milly could hardly bear them." 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.
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).
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). 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 in the Alps, he published The Playground of Europe, which immediately became a mountaineering classic, drawing—together with Edward 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. American Antiquarian Society Members Directory
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.
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:
Stephen was very involved in the organised Ethical Culture. He served multiple terms as President of the West London Ethical Society (part of the Union of Ethical Societies). 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 Culture at that time.
He was President of the Alpine Club from 1865 to 1868 and edited the Alpine Journal, 1868–1872.
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."
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