STEPHEN, SIR LESLIE

born Nov. 28, 1832, London died Feb. 22, 1904, London English critic, man of letters, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. A member of a distinguished intellectual family, Stephen was educated at Eton, at King's College, London, and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was elected to a fellowship in 1854 and became junior tutor in 1856. He was ordained in 1859, but his philosophical studies, combined probably with the controversy that followed the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), caused him to lose his faith; in 1862 he resigned his tutorship and two years later left Cambridge to live in London. Through his brother, James Fitzjames Stephen, a contributor to the Saturday Review, Stephen gained entry to the literary world, contributing to many periodicals. In 1871 George Smith offered him the editorship of The Cornhill Magazine, for which he wrote literary criticism later republished in the three series of Hours in a Library (187479). Stephen was one of the first serious critics of the novel, and his work still deserves consideration by historians of literary criticism. Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edmund Gosse, and Henry James were among those whom Stephen, as an editor, encouraged. After 11 years he resigned from the editorship of Cornhill, but he continued to write for periodicals. His greatest learned work was his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876). His philosophical study The English Utilitarians (1900) was somewhat less successful, though it is still a useful source. His philosophical contribution to the rationalist tradition, Science of Ethics (1882), attempted to wed evolutionary theory to ethics. Stephen's most enduring legacy, however, is the Dictionary of National Biography, which he edited from 1882 to 1891. He edited the first 26 volumes and contributed 378 biographies to that important reference work. In recognition of this service to letters he was created Knight Commander of the Bath in 1902 and received other honours. Stephen's English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904) was a pioneer work in the sociological study of literature. Stephen was shy and given to silence, the more so after the death in 1875 of his first wife, Harriet Marian, the second daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray. In 1878 he married Julia Jackson, the widow of Herbert Duckworth, and among their four children were the painter Vanessa Bell and the novelist Virginia Woolf. Noel G. Annan's Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (1952; reprinted, Walter P. Metzger, ed., 1977) is a notable study. Sir Leslie Stephen's Mausoleum (1978), edited by Alan Bell, is an autobiography written after the death of Stephen's wife Julia in 1895.