While at Cambridge, Stephen became an
Anglican clergyman. In
1865, having renounced his religious beliefs, and after a visit to the
United States two years earlier, where he had formed lasting friendships with
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.
In his spare time, he participated in
athletics and
mountaineering. He also contributed to the
Saturday Review,
Fraser,
Macmillan, the
Fortnightly and other periodicals. He was already known as a climber, as a contributor to
Peaks, Passes and Glaciers (1862), and as one of the earliest presidents of the
Alpine Club, when in 1871, in commemoration of his own
first ascents in the
Alps, he published
The Playground of Europe, which immediately became a mountaineering classic, drawing – together with
Whymper's Scrambles Amongst the Alps – successive generations of its readers to the Alps.
During the eleven years of his editorship, in addition to three volumes of critical studies, he made two valuable contributions to philosophical history and theory:
The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876 and 1881) and
The Science of Ethics (1882); the second of these was extensively adopted as a textbook on the subject. The first was generally recognized as an important addition to philosophical literature and led immediately to Stephen's election at the
Athenaeum Club in
1877.
Stephen also served as the first editor (1885–91) of the
Dictionary of National Biography.
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