Virginia Woolf’s great great great grandfather, James Stephen, was confined to the Kings Bench prison, just another debtor out of luck, in 1769. Because the Stephan family was connected by preternatural and ESP links to English literature, one of his cellmates was Christopher Smart.
When Woolf wrote essays on English authors, she treated them, with good reason, as a sort of family, one related to her own.
The latter, author of one of the great reactionary English tracts, (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) would certainly have contemplated hanging his own great great grandfather, as James Stephen decided the imprisonment of debtors violated habeas corpus, wrote a brief and argued a case on this same line, and organized prisoners to stage a break out and a demonstration to advertise their plight. Someone finally put up the money to free James Stephen, who tried, then, to get into law – only to run into a wall of solicitors and advocates who derided him for his jail term and his lack of training.
Thus, he was forced to go into law through a back door, becoming the practical source of legal knowledge for a shady soliciter. Here is how Leslie Stephen, from his immense Victorian crag above all seediness, describes what happened:
“He had, however, to undertake such business as did not commend itself to the reputable members of the profession. He had a hard struggle and was playing a losing game. He became associated with unfortunate adventurers prosecuting obscure claims against Government, which, even when admitted, did not repay the costs incurred. He had to frequent taverns in order to meet his clients and took to smoking tobacco and possibly to other indulgences.”
“Other indulgences” – the very fount of fiction!
Leslie and his daughter were descended from the second son of this upstart, another James, who stayed with his father in debtors prison and became the pet of Christopher Smart. James, according to Leslie, had a lovecrossed early life, much aided by his reading of romances, and at one point was about to become an “accountant” in Jamaica, another name for overseer, when his elder brother rescued him and sent him to a university in Aberdeen, where he learned a little latin and a lot of cyphering. Then he went back, as a young man, to love affairs. He was a true Bloomsburian avant la lettre – or, perhaps, a true 18th century English buck. His best friend’s sister was the object of his affection, and his best friend was bent on a young beauty named Maria, who lodged at a certain place. So his friend got James a place in Maria’s lodging house and then went on a voyage. The deal was that James would be able to see his friend’s sister and plead his friend’s case with Maria. Of course, this ended up with James falling for Maria and breaking up with his friend’s sister. And so on, turn of the screw time, until eventually as we know from the stories James marries the right girl.
Virginia must have laughed about her ntuple grandfather; one imagines Lytton Strachey enjoying this story.
James, then, eventually married the right girl and went into the law, first in the colonies of course. The colonizing fate of the Stephen family first manifests with James. But it is liberal colonizing, as attitudes turn in the 19th century. On the one hand, against the barbarian practices of the first wave of colonizing, and on the other hand, against the old 18th century curiosity and sense of equality with "native" knowledge.
Before James sailed for Jamaica, he had given an abolitionist talk; once in Jamaica, he quickly became disgusted with the slave system and refused to have slaves. Those who worked for him he manumitted. And he saw, as a judge, the curse adhering to representing justice in a fundamentally unjust system. For these reasons, he became an associate of Wilberforce, and came into touch with other associates, such as Zachary Macaulay.
In a sense, the circles of the Victorian sages overlapped with the family circles of the reformers and the Colonial office. It was a small world.
Of course, when James Stephen's first wife died, he promptly married into the Wilberforce family.
Interestingly, from an American point of view, Virginia Woolf’s ancestor was almost certainly the progenitor of the War of 1812. During the war against Napoleon, American ships were running supplies to supposedly neutral ports, under cover of which they really supplied the Great Beast. Stephen wrote an influential pamphlet urging the government to enforce the old system of the Seven Years war – seizing supposedly neutral vessels and impressing – that is, kidnapping – American sailors.
The numerous critics of Virginia Woolf have insulted her for many things. Curiously, they have forgotten to put “ancestor helped begin the War of 1812” in her debit column.
I, on the other hand, think that no other writer of the 20th century had a family background of such eminent JUICE.
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