Stephen was natural at Kensington Gore in London, the brother of James Fitzjames Stephen and grandson of James Stephen. His personal belonged to the Clapham Sect, a Christian group. At his father's home he saw much of the Macaulays, James Spedding, Sir Henry Taylor and Nassau Senior. Fallowing researching at Eton College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. (Twentieth wrangler) in 1854 and M.A. within 1857, Stephen remained for several years the fellow & coach of his college. He recounted occasionally of his lives around the chapter inside his Life of Fawcett also when inside a bit of less formal Sketches from either Cambridge: By the Don (1865). These sketches were reprinted from either a Pall Mall Gazette, to the owner of which, George Smith, he experienced been introduced by his brother. It was at Smith's home at Hampstead that Stephen met his number 1 married woman, Harriet Marion (d. 1875), girl of William Makepeace Thackeray; after her dying he married Julia Prinsep, widow woman of Herbert Duckworth.

When at Cambridge, Stephen became an Anglican clergyman. Inside 1865, having renounced his religious beliefs, & fallowing the visit to the United States two years earlier, in which he experienced formed lasting friendly relationship sustaining Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton, he settled in London and became a journalist, eventually editing the Cornhill Magazine in 1871 where R.L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, W.E. Norris, Henry James and James Payn figured among his contributors. Inside his spare period, he participated around athletics and mountaineering. He likewise contributed to the Saturday View, Fraser, Macmillan, a Fortnightly & more periodicals. He was already referred to as the climber, as a contributor to Peaks, Lives & Glaciers (1862), & when one of a earliest presidents of the Alpine Club, when within 1871, in commemoration of his have number one ascents of the Schreckhorn and Rothhorn, he published his Playground of Europe.

When you took a eleven years of his editorship, additionally to trey volumes of critical studies, he processed deuce worthful contributions to philosophic history & theory: A History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876 & 1881) & A Science of Ethics (1882); a 2nd one was extensively adopted as a text on the subject. A foremost was usually recognized as an crucial addition to philosophic literature & led immediately to Stephen's election at a Athenaeum Club in 1877.

Stephen too served when a number 1 editor (1885 - 1891) of the Dictionary of National Biography.

Works
Essays in Loose Thought process & Plain Speaking (1873) ''An Agnostic's Apology (1893) A History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) A Science of Ethics (1882) A Utilitarians'' (1900) Life story of Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, George Eliot and Thomas Hobbes.