born Nov. 28, 1832, London, Eng.
died Feb. 22, 1904, London
English critic and man of letters.
After attending Eton College and Cambridge University, he gained entry to literary circles and in 1871 began an 11-year tenure as editor of The Cornhill Magazine , for which he wrote literary criticism. His greatest learned work was his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), but his most enduring legacy is the Dictionary of National Biography , which he edited from 1882 to 1891, personally writing many hundreds of its meticulous articles. He was the father of Virginia Woolf and the painter Vanessa Bell (18791961).