An invasion of croquet

Leslie Stephen at Cambridge

On this day in 1904, the English author, historian and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) died. He was a co-founder of the Alpine Club and the Dictionary of National Biography, among other achievements, but is perhaps best known today for being the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Their mother Julia Duckworth was Stephen’s second wife, but before he married his first wife Minny Thackeray, he had led a very different life as a Cambridge scholar and Church of England minister. This post is about how Leslie Stephen changed his mind.

Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen, by George Beresford, 1902.© National Portrait Gallery, London

In 1854 Leslie Stephen was elected a fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he had previously been a student. In his spare time, he wrote a series of affectionate and sardonic essays about university life, collected and published anonymously in 1865 in a little book called Sketches From Cambridge by A. Don. In the first chapter, he describes Trinity Hall as ‘the ideal of a college’, with its ancient cloisters and courts surrounded by tall trees, organ music drifting through the air and the sounds of high-spirited young men making their way to lectures, as they had done for centuries.

Now this scholarly idyll was under threat, as women were encroaching on its hallowed ground, he wrote:

‘We have a lawn of velvet turf, hitherto devoted to the orthodox game of bowls, but threatened by an invasion of croquet, for female influence is slowly but surely invading our cloisters. Whether, like the ivy that gathers upon our ancient walls, it may ultimately be fatal to their stability, remains yet to be seen’.

Leslie Stephen, c.1860

The University of Cambridge was an all-male, religious institution that had changed little since it was founded in 1513. Students and college fellows lived, studied, taught and dined together in their colleges in a monk-like community. Leslie Stephen claimed that during the fourteen years he spent at Cambridge – first as a student, then a Fellow of Trinity Hall – the only two women that he ever spoke to were his Bedder (college cleaner) and the Master's wife.

The young Leslie was a tall, athletic figure, a keen rower and a leading member of the Alpine Club. He was celebrated for his coaching of the Trinity Hall’s rowing team, and he once walked 50 miles from Cambridge to London on a hot summer's day, simply to have evening dinner at his club. He was also politically active and, unlike most of his peers, supported Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War.

But like many dons, he was highly traditional when it came to the prospect of croquet and crinolines on his college's precious velvet turf. He and others were aware that women at Cambridge were becoming a more visible presence, with some professors now being permitted to marry. The idea of female students did not worry Stephen particularly, probably because he could not even conceive of such an idea.

It was another sort of invasion that Leslie Stephen worried about, that of university wives. Allowing Fellows to marry would, he feared, ‘destroy the strong college spirit which formed such a pleasant bond of union; a married fellow will, I fear, oftener think more of his wife than his college'.

Trinity Hall, Cambridge

But things were changing in Stephen’s own life as well as in the university world. He had been ordained in 1859, but following his loss of religious faith, he gave up Trinity Hall chapel services in 1862 . ‘When I ceased to accept the teachings of my youth, it was not so much a process of giving up beliefs, as of discovering that I had never really believed,’ he later wrote (Maitland, 133). He decided that he could no longer stay in Cambridge, with its close ties to the Church of England, so he moved to London to begin a new career as a writer and journalist. He became editor of The Cornhill Magazine in 1871 and co-founded the Dictionary of National Biography in 1885, and remained its editor until 1891.

After his marriage to Minny Thackeray in 1867, Stephen also changed his mind about married fellows at Cambridge University. ‘I was not discovering that my creed was false, but that I had never really believed it’ he later wrote, in words that echoed his change of heart over losing his religion (National Review, October 1903). He no longer considered that marriage would mean the end of his beloved Trinity Hall, telling his friend, the classicist Richard Claverhouse Jebb, that he was glad that the college's ‘idiotic rule of celibacy’ was gradually being dropped, as it led to unhappiness and isolation.

He even formed a warm friendship with Richard Jebb’s American wife, Caroline Jebb; and one of the first things she did when she moved from Philadelphia to Cambridge was to plan her own croquet lawn, and invite Leslie Stephen to join her in a game. He accepted with pleasure.

Photo by Troy Taylor on Unsplash

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Worth a thousand cigarettes

Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘My Father: Leslie Stephen’ was published after her own death in 1941. It captures brilliantly her youthful frustration with her father’s Victorian strictness and old-fashioned attitudes to women’s higher education - and yet, as she got older, she appreciated the encouragement he gave to her and to her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, to follow their creative paths in life. ‘His sons, with the exception of the Army and Navy, should follow whatever professions they chose,’ Woolf wrote,

‘his daughters, though he cared little enough for the higher education of women, should have the same liberty. If at one moment he rebuked a daughter sharply for smoking a cigarette — smoking was not in his opinion a nice habit in the other sex—she had only to ask him if she might become a painter, and he assured her that so long as she took her work seriously he would give her all the help he could. He had no special love for painting; but he kept his word. Freedom of that sort was worth thousands of cigarettes.’

For further reading, see 'Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904)' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; F.W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (Duckworth, 1906); Leslie Stephen, Sketches From Cambridge by A. Don (MacMillan, 1865); Mary Reed Bobbitt, With Dearest Love to All: The Life and Letters of Lady Jebb (Faber, 1960); Virginia Woolf, ‘My Father: Leslie Stephen’, in The Atlantic (March, 1950).