1937), founder of Duckworth Publishing, married Cecil Alice Scott-Chad in 1921 Leslie Stephen was born in 1832 in South Kensington to Sir James and Lady Jane Catherine Stephen (née Venn), daughter of John Venn, rector of Clapham. The Venns were the centre of the evangelical Clapham Sect. Sir James Stephen was the under secretary at the Colonial Office, and with another Clapham member, William Wilberforce, was responsible for the passage of the Slavery Abolition Bill in 1833. In 1849 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. As a family of educators, lawyers, and writers the Stephens represented the elite intellectual aristocracy. While his family were distinguished and intellectual, they were less colourful and aristocratic than Julia Jackson's. A graduate and fellow of Cambridge University he renounced his faith and position to move to London where he became a notable man of letters. In addition, he was a rambler and mountaineer, described as a "gaunt figure with the ragged red brown beard...a formidable man, with an immensely high forehead, steely-blue eyes, and a long pointed nose." In the same year as Julia Jackson's marriage, he wed Harriet Marian (Minny) Thackeray (1840–1875), youngest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, who bore him a daughter, Laura (1870–1945), but died in childbirth in 1875. Laura was developmentally disabled and eventually institutionalized. The widowed Julia Duckworth knew Leslie Stephen through her friendship with Minny's elder sister Anne (Anny) Isabella Ritchie and had developed an interest in his agnostic writings. She was present the night Minny died and later, tended to Leslie Stephen and helped him move next door to her on Hyde Park Gate so Laura could have some companionship with her own children. Both were preoccupied with mourning and although they developed a close friendship and intense correspondence, agreed it would go no further. Leslie Stephen proposed to her in 1877, an offer she declined, but when Anny married later that year she accepted him and they were married on 26 March 1878. He and Laura then moved next door into Julia's house, where they lived till his death in 1904. Julia was 32 and Leslie was 46. Their first child, Vanessa, was born on 30 May 1879. Julia, having presented her husband with a child and now having five children to care for, decided to limit her family's growth. However, despite the fact that the couple took "precautions,"