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Freud argued in his celebrated essay that ‘the family romance’ had a direct social consequence, since ‘the progress of society in general rests upon the opposition between the generations’. This chapter shows that Leslie Stephen and daughter Virginia Woolf effectively demonstrate the connection between Freud's contentions, and this is especially clear in their relations with the 18th century. The Stephen family emerged as a social, religious, and intellectual force at the very close of the 18th century, a period with which later members of the family, from Sir James Stephen (1789-1859), to his sons James Fitzjames (1829-94) and Leslie (1832-1904), and thence Virginia, became notably preoccupied. It is this Stephen family romance with the 18th century that is used here to explore a very particular dimension of the Victorians' preoccupation with their immediate predecessor generations. Central to this family romance is a rebellion against Christianity, from Leslie Stephen's open advocacy of agnosticism to Virginia Woolf's uncompromising atheism.

The publication of Rev Alexander B. Grosart's edition of The Complete Poems of John Donne, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's intensified interest in developing an integrated account of Izaak Walton's preacher and Grosart's poetic ‘Imaginator’. Because nearly all the poems added by Grosart had not been accepted as genuine, it is easy underestimate the short-term significance of this expanded canon: late Victorian readers were taken in by Grosart's claims. Some, regarding a historic person's domestic life as too insubstantial to matter in the important work of writing the biography of the nation, dismissed the augmented body of love poetry as irrelevant to understanding Donne's significance. Chief here was Augustus Jessopp, who contributed the entry on Donne to The Dictionary of National Biography. Others felt excitement, however, at the prospect of drawing on long hidden materials, as Edward Dowden sought to do, to develop ‘a true and sufficient idea of John Donne’. Both groups agreed that the popular account by Walton warranted serious revision.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the importance of understanding the period immediately preceding the Victorian era for gaining a better understanding of Victorians. The organization of the book is then described, which begins with the contribution of an author born in the mid-1790s, namely Thomas Carlyle, and ending as the consciously Victorian generation began to die out in the 1930s.

The Jamesian Wager has as a premise: the proposition that theistic belief is more rewarding than non-belief in this life, whether or not God exists. This proposition provides the Pascalian a way of circumventing the many-gods objection, which states that the Wager fails because it proves too much. Any number of incompatible religious options can be supported by a wager relevantly like that of Pascal. Three versions of the many-gods objection are examined.

This chapter situates Virginia Woolf's creative response to the Great War in the deep context of the English Liberalism she knew intimately through her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a dean of high Victorian Liberal thought. Where the Liberal government travestied the language of rationalism in its defense of its war policy, Woolf found freedom from the Word of an oppressive patriarchy. Her major development shows in her masterful play with the gestures and postures of logical language. This countermeasure surfaces first in the short stories she wrote during and just after the war, most notably “The Mark on the Wall” and “Solid Objects”. The liberation she enjoyed is witnessed in the new verbal textures of her characteristically modernist novels, most notably Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, where her stylistic experiments are matched with probing accounts of the historical legacy of the war.

This chapter narrates the unfolding drama of Virginia Woolf's extended and extensively well-connected family at Hyde Park Gate. Virginia's parents, Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Stephen, were both married previously before settling down at 22 Hyde Park Gate. Julia Stephen would die early on in Virginia's life, foreshadowing many deaths in the family to come, most notably in the death of her half-sister, Laura Stephen, who was a product of Leslie Stephen's previous marriage. These deaths would haunt Virginia in the years to come, as would the sins of her father Leslie Stephen. In this backdrop, Woolf created for herself certain “memory screens” that transferred the weight of such memories to cover up “what is impossible to say aloud.” Despite her silence on the matter, Woolf remains haunted by these memories, even as the dead continue to exert their influence upon her from beyond the grave.

This chapter studies To the Lighthouse, which is a novel that helped Woolf readjust her relationship with her past, and reviews Woolf's identification with Leslie Stephen as a reader, which had influenced her practice as a writer. It starts by studying the relationship between The Mausoleum Book and To the Lighthouse and then moves on to examine the theme of absence and Woolf's empiricist ideas on whether something exists only when it can be seen. The chapter also looks at Woolf's reaction against the concept of the idealised versions of womanhood.

This chapter demonstrates that, although Woolf’s own parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, were famously agnostic, her wider family was rooted in the Evangelicalism of the Clapham Sect. The chapter presents a detailed history of the involvement of Woolf’s family in the evolution of the Sect, starting with the influential theologies of her great-great-grandfather Rev Henry Venn, and continuing with the anti-slavery activities of her great-grandfather and grandfather, James and Sir James Stephen. Concentrating on her feminist-pacifist essay, Three Guineas, the chapter shows that although Woolf was critical of her ancestors for their religious, patriarchal and imperialist agendas, she also appropriated some of their values. The chapter then explores how conservative values – about women’s roles in particular – persisted, even as later generations of Stephens parted with the faith. It concludes by considering the important role played by Woolf’s Quaker aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen, in the development of both her spirituality and her feminism.

A disproportionately large percentage of the most prominent evolutionary naturalists, and almost every member of the X-Club, traveled and climbed in the Swiss Alps. John Tyndall and Leslie Stephen, in particular, were simultaneously the most vocal of the evolutionary naturalists and the two most accomplished alpinists of their age. The height of their climbing came in the early 1860s, the same years in which they formulated their agnosticism. This paper will examine their journals and letters to uncover the role that mountaineering played as they formulated and defended a naturalistic framework. The questions the mountains forced them to ask, whether through beauty or desolation, order or chaos (what William Clifford termed “cosmic emotion”) helped influence their common project of formulating an ethic based on nature rather than God.

This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.

Sidgwick reviews what he regards as a thorough, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt by Leslie Stephen to establish an ethical doctrine that aligns with the theory of evolution. Stephen engages in discussions that fall under three categories. The first is subjective psychology; Stephen analyses from the individual's perspective the kind of consciousness that precedes and determines volition. The second is sociology; his aim here is to develop a positive morality understood as a property of the social organism. The third kind of discussion falls under ethical theory; Stephen's purpose is to determine systematically the ideal code of morality. Although Stephen's work is to be praised for its abundance of pertinent observations and reflections, Sidgwick finds it lacking in ‘clearness of method and systematic arrangement.’

This chapter focuses on Leslie Stephen's seminal “The Playground of Europe” as a foundational text of modern climbing. It explains how Stephen's work grapples not only with the aftermath of the Matterhorn disaster but also with the fact that all major Alpine peaks had been scaled by 1865. It also investigates Stephen's philosophical and humorous reflections that move emphasis from a particular mountain to one's own faculties, finding challenge and pleasure in the activity of climbing rather than the conquest of first ascents. The chapter looks into the explosion of high-altitude mountaineering and growing popularity of rock climbing all over the world that lends contemporary currency to Stephen's thoughts. It analyzes Stephen's hints at a decisive future direction of climbing at a time when being the first on top of a major Alpine peak is no longer relevant, and scientific inquiry and romantic searching have faded into the background.

This chapter examines the work of a younger generation of Liberal men of letters published between 1860 and 1880. These collected reviews, periodical articles, and monographs demonstrate a renewed interest in Burke, the eighteenth century, and the history of thought more generally. Examination of the work of ‘advanced’ Liberals such as John Morley, Leslie Stephen, and James Fitzjames Stephen reveals that the ‘liberal utilitarian’ label is simplistic and misleading when applied to their characterization of Burke’s thought. It shows instead how these writers and their texts made a rather different contribution, one which is frequently overlooked: Morley and the Stephens were forced to conclude that Burke was an insufficient guide for modern Liberals. Both Leslie Stephen and Morley were also instrumental in linking Burke’s thought to increasingly popular notions of organic development.

James Fitzjames Stephen—prominent barrister, prolific journalist, pugnacious polemicist, and older brother of Leslie Stephen—was elected a member of the Metaphysical Society in 1873. He presented seven papers between his election and his last appearance in 1879, making him one of the Society’s most active members. Alan Brown, in his monograph on the Metaphysical Society, says that Stephen’s papers ‘are the most coherent, consistent, and closely reasoned body of opinion contributed by a single member’. This coherence and consistency, this chapter argues, stem from the identity of those Stephen considered his intellectual adversaries within the Metaphysical Society, adversaries whose views he deemed badly flawed and utterly repugnant. These were its Catholic members, whom Stephen did not regard as true Englishmen. The chapter explains Stephen’s animus and analyses the means he employed to demonstrate the faulty nature of the beliefs held by those he chose to attack. It also examines the impact of his conduct on the health of the Metaphysical Society. Brown asserts that Stephen ‘was in many ways the dominating figure in the latter half of the Society’s history’. This domination, the essay contends, had as much to do with the manner of his doing battle as with the substance of the arguments he set forth. Stephen’s impact, on balance, was harmful, his belligerence discouraging rather than aiding the exchange of ideas and spirit of inquiry the founding members of the Metaphysical Society had sought to foster.

This chapter summarises all the important points that were made in previous chapters, and shows that Woolf's novels were deeply informed by her various readings of earlier literature. It studies Woolf's interaction with the works and legacy of Leslie Stephen, and concludes as it discusses the presence of the literary past in her novels.

As a young woman, Virginia Stephen associated poetry with a patriarchal imagination, due to the overbearing declamations of her father, Leslie Stephen, the Cambridge education in poetry of her older brother, Thoby Stephen, and the misogynistic verse of her cousin J. K. Stephen. These family members’ love of poetry seemed of a piece with their participation in the world of educated, admired men, while their mental instability shaded poetry as perilous as well as patriarchal. This chapter examines the poetry in Virginia Stephen’s world, and ends by studying her early book reviews of poetry.

Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father, seems to have collected newspaper clippings and combined those with a trip to the United States in 1863 to gather “powder and shot, for use in England.” Not to “blow up St. Pauls” but to condemn the Times for what he called its “criminal” coverage of the United States Civil War. Published in 1865, Stephen's 105-page pamphlet builds a case for the Times' “total ignorance of the quarrel,” lack of consistency in reporting on it, and inexcusable abuse of Americans. This chapter considers Stephen's argument, the reactions to it, and its legacy.

This chapter presents a reading of Leslie Stephen's The Science of Ethics (1882). It argues that Stephen's “sense of reality,” as expressed through his choice of metaphor and analogy, is the chief and lasting interest of The Science of Ethics for us today. The book contains an environmental consciousness embedded within and against its more problematic framework of social Darwinism. Stephen's ecological metaphors in The Science of Ethics (an apple on a tree, a bee in a hive) frame his discussion of the relationship between the individual and society, while suggesting a more capacious understanding of the “common good” to extend to the natural environment human society exists within.