# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Stephen, Leslie

​STEPHEN, Sir LESLIE (1832–1904), first editor of this Dictionary, man of letters and philosopher, was born at a house in Kensington Gore, now 42 Hyde Park Gate, on 28 Nov. 1832. His grand-father, James Stephen, his father. Sir James Stephen, and his elder brother. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, are already noticed separately. His father's sister, Annie ​Mary, married Thomas Edward Dicey and was mother of Edward James Stephen Dicey [q. v. Suppl. II] and of Prof. Albert Venn Dicey. His mother, whom Leslie credited with 'strength absolutely free from harshness,' was Jane Catherine, daughter of John Venn, the evangelical rector of Clapham. Her children numbered four sons, of whom Herbert Venn, the eldest, died in 1846 aged twenty-four, and Francis Wilberforce, the second son, died in infancy in 1824. An only daughter, Caroline Emelia, the youngest of the family, is noticed at the close of this article.
In the autumn of 1840 Leslie's parents removed to Brighton for the sake of his health, which suffered from a precociously active brain. There he attended a day school, but on 15 April 1842 he and his brother James Fitzjames entered Eton College as town boys. His parents took a house at Windsor so that their sons might live at home. Leslie made little progress, and was removed by his father at Christmas 1846. After a short experience of a small day school at Wimbledon during 1847, he was sent to King's College, London, on 15 March 1848. There he attended F. D. Maurice's lectures in English literature and history, but they failed to rouse in him any enthusiasm, although his literary sympathies were pronounced from childhood. His health was still uncertain. At Easter 1850 he left King's College. After some coaching at Cambridge from Llewelyn Davies he entered Trinity Hall at Michaelmas 1850. At the end of his first year he won a scholarship in mathematics. To the university Stephen owed an immense debt. His health rapidly improved and became robust, while he quickly assimilated the prevalent atmosphere of dry common-sense. Although mathematics was his chief study, he developed his youthful taste for literature, tried his hand at sketching, and taught himself shorthand, which he practised in correspondence with his sister till the end of his life. He spoke occasionally at the Union Society on the liberal side, and joined the library committee. He was spontaneously drawn to athletics, to which he was previously almost a stranger, and soon distinguished himself as a long-distance runner, a walker of unusual endurance, and 'a fanatical oarsman.' His chief undergraduate friend was Henry Fawcett, who migrated to Trinity Hall in 1853. In Jan. 1854 Stephen was twentieth wrangler in the mathematical tripos. He continued to reside at Cambridge in the hope of gaining a fellowship. In the following long vacation he went to Heidelberg to improve his German.
On 23 Sept. 1854 Stephen was appointed to a Goodbehere fellowship at his college. It was a small post bringing only 100l. a year. Its holder was bound to give some assistance to the two college tutors and to take holy orders within a year. The clerical condition presented no difficulty to Stephen. He had been reared by his parents in orthodox beliefs and had taken them on trust. Accordingly on 21 Dec. 1855 he was ordained deacon by the archbishop of York, and became priest on Trinity Sunday 1859. He pleased his father by entering the church, and the step provided him with a modest livelihood. Meanwhile on 29 April 1856 he was admitted to the junior tutorship which then fell vacant at Trinity Hall, and was only tenable by a clergyman. He occasionally preached in the college chapel and at St. Edward's church in the town, and he taught mathematics to the more promising undergraduates. But his chief energies were absorbed by the social welfare of the college and its athletic prestige, by private study of current literature and philosophy, and by intercourse with the manifest and most enlightened of resident graduates.
Stephen's athletic prowess brought him his first fame. For the college boat, which he coached for many years, he cherished an especial affection (cf. Sir G. O. Trevelyan in Macmillan's Magazine, May 1860). His staying power grew as a runner and walker. He walked from Cambridge to dine in London — fifty miles — in twelve hours. In 1860 he won the mile race (5 mins. 4 sec.) at the university athletic games, which he helped to start, and he encouraged the inauguration of the inter-university sports which began in 1864. But it was as a mountaineer that his athletic zeal showed to best advantage. In 1855 he had tramped through the Bavarian highlands in Tyrol, and in 1857, during a holiday spent at Courmayeur, he made, with Francis Galton, his first Swiss ascent — the Col du Géant. Next year, after climbing Monte Rosa, he joined the Alpine Club, of which he remained a member till death. Thenceforth he was an ardent Alpinist and distinguished; himself by many new ascents. In 1860] he described the 'Ascent of the Allalinhorn' in Francis Galton's 'Vacation Tourists' (1861). In 1861 he first vanquished the Schreckhorn in the Oberland and made the passage of the Eiger Joch, writing of these exploits in ​'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers' (vol. ii. 1862). In the same year (1861) he achieved the first complete ascent of Mont Blanc from St. Gervais. In 1862 he added to his conquests the Jungfrau Joch, the Viescher Joch, and the Monte della Disgrazia. In 1864 he scaled the Lyskamm, Zinal Rothhorn, and the Jungfrau. The summer of 1866 was spent in the eastern Carpathians with Mr. James Bryce.
After his first marriage in 1867 his mountaineering activity gradually diminished (cf. his Regrets of a Mountaineer, Nov. 1867). But he explored the Dolomites in 1869 and was in Switzerland again in 1871, in 1873, and 1875. In later life he only visited the Alpine country in the winter. The last visit was paid in 1894, when he stayed at Chamonix with his friend of early mountaineering days, M. Gabriel Loppe, the Trench Alpine artist. Stephen became a master of mountain craft, fleet of foot, but circumspect and cautious. His merit was acknowledged by his election as president of the Alpine Club (1865-8). From 1868 to 1871 he served, too, as editor of the 'Alpine Journal.' But mountaineering appealed to Stephen not only as a sport but also as an incentive to good-fellowship. Many of his closest friendships were formed in the Alps. With his guide Melchior Anderegg, whom he regularly employed from his first season in 1858, he was always on the best of terms. Anderegg was Stephen's guest in London in 1861 and 1888. Stephen felt deeply the beauty of the mountains, and it was his Alpine experiences which led him to become an author. His first book was a modest translation from the German of H. Berlepsch's 'The Alps : or Sketches of Life and Nature in the Mountains.' But he was soon contributing accounts of his Alpine ascents to the 'Alpine Journal' and elsewhere. These papers he collected in 1871 as 'The Playground of Europe,' with a frontispiece by his fellow-mountaineer Edward Whymper [q. v. Suppl. II] (2nd edit, revised, 1894, reissued in Longmans' 'Silver Library,' 1899). In the literature of mountaineering, Stephen's papers inaugurated a new style. It was vivid, direct, and unpretendingly picturesque, at the same time as it was serious and reflective.
The years which Stephen spent at Cambridge as a college don were probably the happiest of his life. But his position underwent an important change in the summer of 1862. His reading in Mill, Comte, and Kant, and his independent thought had led him to reject the historical evidences of Christianity. He declined to take part in the chapel services. Thereupon at the Master's request he resigned his tutorship. Owing apparently to the influence of his friend Fawcett, he was allowed to retain his fellowship and some minor offices. He had never taken the clerical vocation very seriously. He had not examined closely the religious convictions in which he was bred, and he abandoned them with relief and without mental perturbation. He did not, he said, lose his faith, he merely discovered that he never had any. Stephen's scepticism steadily grew thenceforth, and on 25 March 1875 he took advantage of the Act of 1870, and relinquished his orders.
When he was freed from tutorial and clerical duties, Stephen's interests took a wider range. He naturally sympathised with the views of the philosophical radicals of whom Mill was high priest. In university politics he was on the side of reform and desired to see the efficiency of the university increased. In 1863 he published a tract, 'The Poll Degree from the Third Point of View,' in which he urged the need of making the pass examination more adaptable to students' needs and abilities. But he was not greatly excited by university controversies. He was more stirred by the political ambitions of his college friend Henry Fawcett, professor of political economy in the university, who had become blind in 1859. Resolved to enter the House of Commons in the radical interest, Fawcett early in 1863 vainly contested the town of Cambridge with Stephen's active help. Next year Fawcett stood, again unsuccessfully, for Brighton; Stephen was his ablest electioneering lieutenant, and, by way of advocating his friend's candidature, ran a daily paper which he wrote himself and called 'The Brighton Election Reporter.'
One political issue of the day moved Stephen's especial ardour. He was a staunch adherent of the cause of the North in the American civil war, and an enthusiastic champion of slavery emancipation. In the summer of 1863, armed with some introductions from his first cousin, Edward Dicey, he went to America to study the question at first hand. At Boston he met J. R. Lowell, who was soon an intimate friend, and he made the acquaintance of Garrison and Wendell Phillips. His itinerary took him from New York to Chicago, down the Mississippi to St. Louis, and thence by Cincinnati to Philadelphia and Washington. After seeing Abraham Lincoln at the White House he visited the seat of war in Virginia and ​inspected General Mead's army. He came home more convinced than before of the righteousness of the northern plea. Subsequently he published 'The Times on the American War, by L. S.' (1865), in which he sought to refute the English arguments in favour of the South.
At the end of 1864 Stephen left Cambridge for London in order to embark on a literary career. He retained his fellowship till 1867, when it lapsed on his marriage. At times he thought of attempting other than literary occupation. He was for a brief period secretary of the newly formed Commons Preservation Society in 1865, and on 27 May 1867 he was admitted a student of the Inner Temple, in spite of some doubt as to his eligibility owing to his clerical orders; but he was not called to the bar, and removed his name from the books of the Inn in 1875. Sufficient literary work was quickly offered him to make it needless for him to seek employment elsewhere.
His brother, James Fitzjames Stephen, was between 1860 and 1870 dividing his practice at the bar with a vigorous pursuit of journalism. He was acquainted with Carlyle, Froude, and other literary leaders, and to his recommendations Leslie owed a promising start in the literary world. Leslie was soon invited to write for the 'Saturday Review,' and for many years he contributed two articles a week — a review and a 'middle.' There he attacked every subject from popular metaphysics to the university boatrace, but avoided politics and religion, on which the paper pursued conservative lines. But more important to his future literary career was his brother's early introduction of him to George Smith, who during 1864 was laying the foundation of a new evening paper, the 'Pall Mall Gazette.' The editor, Frederick Greenwood, welcomed Stephen's co-operation, and from the second number on 8 Feb. 1865 he was a regular contributor of miscellaneous literary matter for six years, and was an occasional contributor at later dates, notably in 1880, when Mr. John Morley suddenly succeeded Greenwood as editor. To the 'Pall Mall' he contributed at the outset a series of frankly humorous and occasionally flippant 'Sketches from Cambridge, by a Don' (1865). From October 1866 to August 1873 he wrote, too, a fortnightly article on English affairs for the weekly 'Nation' of New York, of which the editor was Edwin Lawrence Godkin [q. v. Suppl. II]. Here Stephen dealt with the political situation at Westminster and occasionally attended for the purpose the sittings of the House of Commons, which wearied him.
At the same time he formed important connections with the chief monthly magazines. In 1866 he began writing for the 'Cornhill Magazine,' another of George Smith's literary ventures. At first he wrote there on social themes under the signature of 'A Cynic' (not reprinted), but he soon confined himself in the 'Cornhill' to literary criticism, which, according to the practice of the magazine, was anonymous. His literary essays from 1871 onwards bore the general heading 'Hours in a Library,' and were collected from time to time in separate volumes (1st ser. 1874; 2nd ser. 1876; 3rd ser. 1879). His position as an independent and sagacious literary critic was thereby established. His relations with the 'Cornhill' had meanwhile growth in importance. In February 1871 George Smith appointed him editor, and he held the post for more than eleven years. He was thus enabled to abandon much of his joumalism, but he remained faithful to the 'Saturday.' In the 'Cornhill' magazine he sought to uphold a high standard of theme and style. He encouraged young writers, many of whom afterwards became famous, and with whom he formed cordial and enduring personal relations. Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, James Sully, W. E. Henley, Henry James, and Edmund Gosse were among the contributors in whose work Stephen took especial pride. When visiting Edinburgh to lecture on the Alps in February 1875 he sought out in the infirmary there W. E. Henley, who had offered the magazine his 'In Hospital' series of poems; a day or two later Stephen introduced R. L. Stevenson to the sick room, with the result that an interesting literary friendship was formed. Matthew Arnold's 'Literature and Dogma' ran through the 'Cornhill' under Stephen's auspices ; but it was in purely literary work that the magazine won its reputation during Stephen's editorship.
Not that literature was by any means the editor's sole personal interest. Religious and philosophical speculation engaged much of his attention, and he presented his results elsewhere than in the 'Cornhill.' J. A. Froude, who was editor of 'Fraser's Magazine,' and Mr. John Morley, who was editor of the 'Fortnightly Review,' gave him every opportunity of defining his position in the pages of those periodicals. A collection of religious and philosophic essays, which he fittingly entitled 'Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking,' came out in ​1873. The book constituted him a leader of the agnostic school, and a chief challenger of the popular religion, which he charged with inability to satisfy genuine spiritual needs. But Stephen was not content to dissipate his energy in journalism or periodical writing. His leisure was devoted to an ambitious 'History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century' (1876, 2 vols.), in which he explained the arguments of the old English deists and the scepticism of Hume. In June 1876 his article called 'An Agnostic's Apology,' in the 'Fortnightly Review,' further revealed his private convictions and went far to familiarise the public with the term 'agnostic,' which had been invented in 1870 by Huxley, but had not yet enjoyed much vogue.
In spite of his unpopular opinions, Stephen's critical powers were generally acknowledged, and although somewhat distant and shy in manner he was an honoured figure in the best intellectual society. He had married in 1867 the younger daughter of Thackeray, and settled with his wife and her sister (now Lady Richmond Ritchie) at 16 Onslow Gardens, South Kensington; thence he moved in 1872 to a newly built residence at 8 Southwell Gardens, and in 1876 to 11 (now 22) Hyde Park Gate, where 'he remained till death. A second visit to America in 1868 (with his wife) greatly extended his American acquaintance and confirmed his sympathies with the country and its people. He there met Emerson, 'a virtuous old saint,' who was never one of his heroes, but Charles Eliot Norton and Oliver Wendell Holmes the younger were, like Lowell, thenceforth reckoned for life among his dearest friends and most faithful correspondents. In England he came to be on affectionate terms with George Meredith, whom he first met by chance at Vienna in 1866 on a holiday tour, and with Mr. John Morley. Carlyle, whom he often visited, equally repelled and attracted him, and he usually felt dazed and speechless in his presence. In 1877 the committee elected Stephen to the Athenæum under Rule II. In 1879 he formed among his literary friends a society of Sunday walkers which he called 'The Tramps'; he remained its 'leader' till 1891, making his last tramp in 1894, when the society dissolved. 'The Tramps,' with Stephen at their head, were from time to time entertained on their Sunday expeditions by Darwin at Down, by Tyndall at Hindhead, and by George Meredith at Box Hill.
Stephen's literary fertility was exceptional, and seemed little affected by the domestic crises of his career, his first wife's sudden death in 1875 and his second marriage in 1878. During 1876-1877 he wrote fourteen articles for the 'Cornhill' and four for the 'Fortnightly.' On 7 Aug. 1877 Mr. John Morley invited him to inaugurate with a volume on Johnson the projected series of monographs called 'English Men of Letters.' The manuscript was delivered on 4 Feb. 1878 and was soon published. It was, Stephen wrote, 'the cause of more compliments than anything he had done before.' The book satisfied the highest requirements of brief literary biography. To the same series Stephen subsequently contributed with little less success memoirs of Pope (1880) and Swift (1882), and towards the close of his life for a new series of 'English Men of Letters' he wrote on 'George Eliot' (1902) and on Hobbes (1904). But again his deepest thought was absorbed by philosophical questions. He had joined in 1878 the Metaphysical Society on the eve of its dissolution, and read two papers at its meetings, but he spoke with impatience of the society's debates. In 1882 he produced his 'Science of Ethics,' in which he summed up, in the light of his study of Mill, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, his final conclusions on the dominant problems of life.
In the summer of 1881 George Smith broached to Leslie Stephen a project, which he then first contemplated, of a great Dictionary of Biography. The discussion continued through great part of the next year (1882) and ended in the evolution of the plan of this 'Dictionary of National Biography.' Stephen urged that the scheme should be national rather than universal, the scope which was originally suggested. George Smith entrusted Stephen with the editorship, and he entered on its duties in November 1882. At the same time he resigned the editorship of the 'Cornhill,' which had failed pecuniarily of late years, and was succeeded there by his friend, James Payn [q. v. Suppl. I].
Stephen possessed obvious qualifications for the control of George Smith's great literary design. His wide reading, his catholic interests in literary effort, his tolerant spirit, his sanity of judgment, and his sense of fairness, admirably fitted him for the direction of an enterprise in which many conflicting points of view are entitled to find expression. On the other hand, though familiar with the general trend of history, he was not a trained historical student, and was prone to impatience with mere antiquarian research. But he recognised that archaeological details within ​reasonably liberal limits were of primary importance to the Dictionary, and he refused mercy to contributors who offered him vague conjecture or sentimental eulogy instead of unembroidered fact. To the selection of contributors, to the revision of manuscripts, to the heavy correspondence, to the clerical organisation, he gave at the outset anxious attention. But he never quite reconciled himself to office routine, and his steady application soon developed a nervous depression. The first volume of the Dictionary appeared under his editorship in January 1885, and the stipulated issue of the succeeding volumes at quarterly intervals was never interrupted. But Stephen's health soon rendered periodic rests necessary. At the end of 1886 he spent the Christmas vacation in Switzerland, and he revisited the Alps in the winters of 1888, 1889, and 1890. In 1889 a serious breakdown compelled a year's retirement from the editorship, in the course of which he paid a third visit to America and received the degree of LL.D. from Harvard. A recurrence of illness led to his resignation of his editorial office in April 1891, after more than eight years' tenure. He was succeeded by the present writer, who had become his assistant in March 1883, and was joint editor from the beginning of 1890. The twenty-sixth volume of the original issue of the Dictionary is the last bearing Stephen's name on the title-page. But Stephen had been from the outset a chief contributor to the work as well as editor, and re-established health enabled him to write important articles for the Dictionary until the close of the first supplement in 1901. To the substantive work he contributed 378 articles, covering 1000 pages, and dealing with such names as Addison, Burns, Byron, Carlyle, Coleridge, Defoe, Dickens, Dryden, Goldsmith, Hume, Landor, Macaulay, the Mills, Milton, Pope, Scott, Swift, Thackeray, and Wordsworth. Although in letters to friends Stephen repeatedly complained of the ‘drudgery’ of his editorial task, and frequently avowed regret at his enforced withdrawal from speculative inquiry, he expressed every satisfaction in living to see the work completed.
While Stephen was actively engaged in editorial labours he yet found time for other literary work. In 1883 he was chosen the first Clark lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and delivered a course of lectures on eighteenth-century literature, but he resigned the post at the end of the year. In 1885 he wrote a sympathetic biography of Henry Fawcett, his intimate friend from Cambridge days, who had died on 6 Nov. 1884. On his retirement from the editorship of the Dictionary in 1891 he reverted to a plan which had long occupied his mind—of extending to the nineteenth century his ‘History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.’ But his scheme underwent many vicissitudes, and after long delay the work took the limited shape of an account of ‘The English Utilitarians,’ which was published in three volumes in 1900. Although somewhat discursive, the work abounds in happy characterisation of movements and men.
Stephen, although little of a propagandist, was never indifferent to the growth in the number of adherents to his ethical and religious views. The movement for forming ethical societies with Sunday services in various parts of London found in him an active supporter. He became president of the Ethical Societies of London, and in that capacity he delivered many lectures, which he collected in two volumes, entitled ‘Social Rights and Duties’ (1896). At the same time he continued to write on biography, criticism, and philosophy in the magazines with all his old zest and point, and as was his wont he collected these efforts from time to time. A volume named ‘An Agnostic's Apology,’ after the opening paper, which was reprinted from the ‘Fortnightly’ of June 1876, came out in 1893, and ‘Studies of a Biographer,’ in two series, each in two volumes, in 1899 and 1902.
Loss of friends and kinsfolk deeply tried Stephen's affectionate nature towards the end of his life. With James Russell Lowell, while he was United States ambassador in London, Stephen's relations grew very close (1880–7), and after Lowell's death on 12 Aug. 1891 Stephen organised with his wife's aid the presentation of a stained glass memorial window to the chapter-house at Westminster. The death of George Croom Robertson [q. v.] in 1892 and of James Dykes Campbell [q. v. Suppl. I] in 1895 removed two very congenial associates. Of his friends Henry Sidgwick and James Payn he wrote in the first supplement of this Dictionary. But a severer blow was the death on 11 March 1894 of his elder brother, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen [q. v.], of whom he prepared with great rapidity a full memoir between November 1894 and January 1895. The death, on 5 May 1895, of his second wife, to whose devotion he owed much, caused him poignant grief, from which he recovered slowly. Yet in spite of private sorrows and of the growing infirmity ​of deafness which hampered his social intercourse in his last years he wrote, shortly before his death, that 'not only had he had times of exceeding happiness,' but that he had been 'continuously happy except for certain periods.'
Stephen received in later life many marks of distinction. He was chosen president of the London Library in 1892 in succession to Lord Tennyson, and keenly interested himself until his death in its welfare. He was made hon. LL.D. of Edinburgh in 1885, and of Harvard in 1890; hon. Litt.D. of Cambridge in June 1892, and D.Litt. of Oxford in December 1901. He was elected hon. fellow of Trinity Hall on 13 June 1891, and a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society in December 1895. In June 1902, on the occasion of King Edward VII's coronation, he was made K.C.B. He was also appointed in 1902 an original fellow of the British Academy, and he was for a year a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.
In 1901 Stephen edited 'The Letters of J. R. Green,' and in 1903 he contributed to the 'National Review' four autobiographical articles called 'Early Impressions,' which showed no decline of vivacity (not reprinted). His latest books were the monograph on Hobbes (posthumously published, 1904), and 'English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century' (published on the day of his death), a course of lectures prepared in his capacity of Ford lecturer in English History at Oxford for 1903; illness compelled him to entrust to another the delivery of these lectures.
Stephen's health broke down in the spring of 1902, when internal cancer manifested itself. The disease progressed slowly. An operation in December 1902 gave temporary relief, but he thenceforth lived the life of an invalid. He was able to pursue some Hterary work till near the end. He died at his residence, 22 Hyde Park Gate, on 22 Feb. 1904. He was cremated at Golder's Green^ and his ashes were buried in Highgate cemetery.
Stephen's work, alike in literary criticism and philosophy, was characterised by a frank sincerity which is vivified by a humorous irony. His intellectual clarity bred an impatience of conventional religious beliefs and many strenuous endeavours to prove their hollowness. The champions of the broad church excited his particular disdain, because to his mind they were muddle-headed, and therefore futile. He put no trust in halfway houses. At the same time both in his philosophical and especially in his literary judgments there was an equability of temper which preserved him from excesses of condemnation or eulogy. Reserved and melancholy in manner, he enjoyed the affectionate admiration of his most enlightened contemporaries. His friend George Meredith sketched him in the 'Egoist' (1879) as Vernon Whitford, 'a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar'; Meredith admitted that the portrait did not do Stephen 'full justice, though the strokes within and without are correct' (Meredith's Letters, ii. 331). There was something of the Spartan in Stephen's constitution. But there was no harshness about his manly tenderness, his unselfishness, and his modesty. To younger associates he was always generous in encouragement and sympathy. His native magnanimity abhorred all the pettiness of temper which often characterises the profession of letters. It is supererogatory to dwell here on the services which he rendered to this Dictionary, alike as first editor and as chief contributor.
Stephen married (1) on 19 June 1867, Harriet Marian, younger daughter of Thackeray the novelist (she died in London suddenly on 28 Nov. 1875); (2) on 26 March 1878, Julia Prinsep, widow of Herbert Duckworth and youngest daughter of Dr. John Jackson, long a physician at Calcutta, by his wife Maria Pattle; she was a woman of singular beauty and refinement of mind, and died after a short illness on 5 May 1895. She was a close friend of G. F. Watts, who painted her portrait, of James Russell Lowell, and of George Meredith. She published in 1883 'Notes from Sick Rooms,' and wrote for this Dictionary a memoir of her aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron. By his first wife Stephen left a daughter, Laura; and by his second wife two sons and two daughters. The elder son, Julius Thoby Stephen (1880-1906), was at one time scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge.
A portrait by G. F. Watts, painted in 1878, belongs to his surviving son, Adrian. His 'Collected Essays' (10 vols., with introd. by Mr. James Bryce and Mr. Herbert) came out in 1907.
Stephen's friends founded in 1905 the Leshe Stephen lectureship in Cambridge, for the biennial delivery of a public lecture 'on some literary subject, including therein criticism, biography, and ethics.' The subscribers also presented an engraving of Stephen's portrait by Watts to the Athenæum, the London Library, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, the Working Men's College, London, and Harvard University, ​institutions with which he had been associated.
Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834–1909), Sir Leslie Stephen's only sister, and youngest of the family, was born at Kensington on 8 Dec. 1834. Educated at home in a literary atmosphere, she became an occasional contributor at an early age to the 'Saturday Review' and the 'Spectator.' Always religiously inclined, she occupied herself with philanthropic work, and in 1871 published a sympathetic tractate on 'The Service of the Poor.' Acquaintance with Robert Fox and his family at Falmouth interested her in the Society of Friends. After attending several Friends' meetings she joined the society in 1879, being almost the only convert to Quakerism of her generation. She explained the grounds of her conversion in 'Quaker Strongholds' (1891). She remained till her death a loyal and zealous member of the society. Establishing herself in Chelsea after her mother's death in 1875, she continued in spite of feeble health her philanthropic activities. She was on friendly terms with Octavia Hill (1838-1912), and under her influence built in Chelsea a block of tenements which she called Hereford Buildings, and collected the rents herself. She subsequently moved to Westcott, near Dorking, and in 1882 to West Malvern. In 1885 she settled at Cambridge, where she remained till her death. Her niece, Miss Katharine Stephen, was principal of Newnham College, and Miss Stephen occasionally gave addresses there and at Girton. Some of these were published in the 'Hibbert Journal.' A collected volume of addresses and essays, chiefly on rehgious subjects, appeared in 1908 as 'Light Arising.' In 1908 she privately printed a selection of her father's correspondence under the title 'The First Sir James Stephen.' Until deafness disabled her she served on the committee of management of the convalescent home attached to Addenbrooke's hospital. She died at The Porch, Cambridge, on 7 April 1909, and was buried there. After her death was published 'The Vision of Faith and other Essays' (1911), with a memoir by her niece, Katharine Stephen, and notice of her relation with the Society of Friends by Dr. Thomas Hodgkin.
[F. W. Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 1906; The Times, 23 Feb. 1904 (by the present writer); the present writer's Principles of Biography, the Leslie Stephen Lecture, Cambridge, 1911; Life and Letters of J. R. Lowell; George Meredith's Letters, 1912; Alpine Journal, vol. xxii.. May 1904 (by James Bryce); Cornhill Mag., April 1904 (art. by Frederic Harrison); A. W. Benn, History of English Rationalism, in the Nineteenth Century, 1906, ii. 384 seq.]
S. L.