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IN 1891, J. K. STEPHEN (1859-1892) wrote in "To P. L., Aged 4½" that if "as the years go by" the addressed girl should keep "any phrase of mine, / Aglow with memory's cheering fire," then the poet will not "Have written quite in vain."1 In his lifetime this versifier, actor, and orator was much admired wherever he went, from Eton to Cambridge to literary London. Yet today J. K. Stephen's memory endures in dispiriting embers rather than cheering fire. He is known primarily among Etonians and Ripperologists, the former for his legendary turn as Keeper of the College Wall in the Eton Wall Game, the latter for his candidacy as Jack himself.2 Posterity's neglect is in this case just: J. K. Stephen's verse is simplistic and often wantonly cruel, and the man was repellent and erratic in emotions and behavior, the more so after an accident in 1886 that eventually led to his death from mania. It is not surprising that Stephen is little remembered today; it is instead surprising that he should ever have been celebrated.
This article does not aim to restore Stephen to cultural memory but instead to draw on his life, verse, and impressions on others to make two arguments. First, Stephen's disproportionately high repute attests to the late-Victorian esteem of apparent masculine power. Second, Stephen played a minor but yet unrecognized role in the imaginative lives of Julia Duckworth Stephen and her daughter, Virginia Woolf.
This major presence with a minor talent may already be familiar, outside of Etonians and Ripperologists, to readers of Woolf, who, late in her life, recalled her first cousin thus:
This great mad figure with his broad shoulders and very clean cut mouth, and the deep voice and the powerful face-and the very blue eyes-this mad man would recite poetry to us; "The Burial of Sir John Moore," I remember; and he always brings to mind some tormented bull; and also Achilles-Achilles on his pressed bed lolling roars out a deep applause.3
The son of Leslie's brother James Fitzjames, James Kenneth Stephen was known publicly as J.K.S. or J. K. Stephen and known by his family and friends as Jim or Jem (here J.K.S. to distinguish him from his relatives). As Woolf knew him,...