Stephen, Sir Leslie 1832-1904
English scholar and critic

Born in London, he was the brother of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen and grandson of the abolitionist James Stephen, and father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Brought up in a Christian circle known as the 'Clapham Sect', he was educated at Eton, King's College London and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He was ordained and became a Fellow of Trinity Hall (1864), but he left the church in 1870 and became an agnostic. He published his reasons in Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873) and An Agnostic's Apology (1893). He helped to found the Pall Mall Gazette, and was editor of the Cornhill Magazine (1871-82). He launched the English Men of Letters series with a biography of Dr Johnson (1878), and in 1876 he published The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), which is generally regarded as his most important work. He also wrote The Science of Ethics (1882), and The Utilitarians (3 vols, 1900), and was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (1882-91), from 1890 jointly with Sir Sidney Lee. A noted athlete and mountaineer, he published a collection of mountaineering sketches in Playground of Europe (1871).

Bibliography: Noel G Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (1952)