Books do furnish a life
D. J. Taylor
SELECTED LETTERS OF LESLIE STEPHEN: VOLUME I, 1864-1882, VOLUME II, 1882-1904 edited by John W. Bicknell Macmillan (two-volume set), £90, pp. 570 Getting on for a century after his death, Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) is still a highly attractive figure. In fact such is the volume of Stephen's appearances on a succession of late-Victorian stages that it is difficult to know where to start in assessing his influence. Personal connections aside — he was Thackeray's son-in-law as well as Virginia Woolf's father — the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography would be enough to establish anyone's importance for all time. To a nine-year stint on George Smith's monumental undertaking — it had reached Volume XXIV by the time Stephen resigned in 1891 — can be added the early forays on the side of rationalism, the pioneering studies in literary sociology, and even the entity apostrophised by Q. D. Leavis as `Leslie Stephen, Cambridge Critic.'
This description might tell you more about Mrs Leavis than the author of English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, but no one could doubt the seriousness with which it was applied. From his championing of Hardy in the pages of the Comhill to the pontoon-bridge he constructed between Evangelical tradi- tion and the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury, few literary journalists have intervened to such purpose in the wilder cultural land- scape.
Like many another Victorian rationalist, Stephen began his career as a clergyman- don at Cambridge, albeit of an unusually vigorous sort: he was a celebrated Alpinist and thought nothing of walking a 26-mile round-trip to eat his Christmas lunch. Resigning his fellowship in his early thirties — the realisation that he could no longer conduct divine service had come a couple of years earlier — he migrated to London and set up as a literary freelance, appearing in Fraser's, the Saturday Review and the Comhill, and contributing to most of the great intellectual debates of the day. Marriage to Thackeray's younger daughter Minny brought him great personal happi- ness (`. . I ought, if I have done rightly, to have conveyed to you the impression that I am almost happier and more comfortable than a man ought to be in this world', he wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1867) while also pushing him into the orbit of Minny's novel-writing elder sister Anny. Charmed by Anny's liveliness and good humour — the three of them set up house together after the honeymoon — Leslie was also exasperated by her cavalier attitude to money and her literary career, and there are some sharp lectures pointing out the difference between pere et fils. (Doesn't your father preach the wicked- ness of sacrificing ourselves to the world? Don't you agree with this? Why don't you act up to it?') The Thackeray connection was important to Stephen: he wrote a percep- tive essay on his father-in-law, as well as taking up the latter's old job as editor of the Comhill. Minny's sudden death from eclampsia in 1875 was a grievous blow, although he subsequently consoled himself by marrying Julia, Herbert Duckworth's beautiful widow. (Anny, meanwhile, had become engaged to a cousin 17 years her junior, much to her brother-in-law's disapproval.) As an antidote there was always work — the epochal History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), three volumes of Hours in a Library, the Science of Ethics (1882) — a quintessential period exploration of morali- ty in the absence of God — culminating in Smith's invitation to edit the DNB.
Excellent at bringing out Stephen's warm feelings for each of his wives, and his general vivacity as a correspondent, John W. Bicknell's splendid selection of Stephen's letters also throws a revealing light on some of the contradictions of his subject's career. Some of these are only the inconsistencies that traditionally separate the private from the public — the advocate of plain speaking covering up embarrass- ments with white lies, the self-confident public figure confessing to doubts about his ability, the flag-bearer of progressive thought complaining that such-and-such an editor isn't a gentleman: others seem much more fundamental to Stephen's sense of himself. It might even be wondered why an animated, 'liberal' controversialist of Stephen's type should want to embalm himself in the genteel ink of the Comhill, which even Victorians thought staid (Delete amorous' ran one of his annota- tions to Hardy's manuscripts, 'substitute sentimental'), or take on some of the grub- bier administrative work pf the dictionary: arguing with Professor Freeman (who wanted all Anglo-Saxon names begin- ning with A or E to be converted to dipthongs), spotting Grosart's plagiarisms and receiving letters from disappointed contributors signed, 'Your justly incensed enemy'.
At the same time, to accuse Stephen of settling for second best, of consciously damping down the demands of what his daughter, at any rate, remembered as a fiery personality, is to forget the substantial distance travelled, and the achievements knocked up along the way.
Stephen's vividness is difficult to convey without extended quotation. Some of it emerges, perhaps, in the mock-waspishness over Tennyson, seen in the company of some admiring fellow-diners ('We are never asked whether we will have the precise variety of biscuit which suits our taste; & we do not observe elegant females going down on their knees to us to beg us to par- don a critic in the Slaturdayl R[eviewJ for not calling us equal to Shakespeare.') Professor Bicknell has produced a tri- umph of scholarship, not least in his brief look at the sequestered life of Laura Make- peace Stephen, Minny's mentally retarded daughter, born three months prematurely in December 1870, whose long, twilit existence continued almost to the end of the second world war: In all Bicknell's 570 pages there are only a couple of dozen ref- erences to Laura, who said 'papa' at six months but then cried over her books and was eventually consigned to the care of governesses in the country. What happened to her? Who cared for her after aunt Anny's death in 1919? We shall probably never know, but in the meantime Messrs Macmillan could help potential enquirers by repackaging these two fat volumes at a price ordinary readers can afford.
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