Leslie Stephen

Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), English biographer, critic, and philosopher, born in London, and educated at King's College and at the University of Cambridge. He was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church and remained at Cambridge as a tutor. In 1864 he returned to London and began to write critical essays for leading periodicals. These essays were subsequently collected under the title Hours in a Library (3 vols., 1874, 1876, 1879). From 1871 to 1882 he was editor of The Cornhill Magazine. Stephen's outstanding achievement was his editorship, begun in 1882, of the first 26 volumes of Dictionary of National Biography, to which he contributed nearly 400 biographies. During this period his readings in philosophy and ethics led him to a position of extreme scepticism. He repudiated his ordination in 1875 and stated his theological opinions in An Agnostic's Apology, which appeared in the magazine Fortnightly in 1876 and as a book in 1893. He subsequently devoted much of his time to philosophical writings such as The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) and The English Utilitarians (3 vols., 1900), both of which were strongly influenced by the work of the 18th-century philosopher David Hume and the 19th-century utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and James and John Stuart Mill. As a philosopher Stephen was especially preoccupied with ethics. His Science of Ethics (1882) was widely adopted as a textbook. Virginia Woolf, novelist and literary critic, was his youngest daughter.