Leonard Woolf was born on November 25, 1880, on West Cromwell Road in the Kensington district of London. As he remarks in Sowing, the first volume of his autobiography,1 he emerged from non-existence at that point, and he anticipated returning to non-existence at some latter point. This struck his characteristic ironic, bleak, and amused note: how he approached his life. He was determined to make the most of it, but he was also aware that in so many ways it was an exercise in futility: “I cannot truthfully say that my future extinction causes me much fear or pain, but I should like to record my protest against it and against the universe that enacts it” (Sowing, 11–12). Here, at the very beginning of his autobiography, he rails against a deity in whom some believe, though he certainly did not, yet who seems to have arranged the world very badly:
I resent the stupid wastefulness of a system which requires that human beings with great labour and pain should spend years in acquiring knowledge, experience, and skill, and then when at last they might use all this in the service of mankind and for their own happiness, they lose their teeth and their hair and their wit, and are hurriedly bundled, together with all that they have learnt, into the grave and nothingness.
(Sowing, 12)
His maternal grandfather, Nathan de Jongh, a Jewish diamond merchant, and his wife, Henriette, came to London in the 1860s from Holland. With the discovery of diamonds in South Africa, London had increasingly become a center of the diamond trade. Considering his later anti-imperialism, it is ironic that Leonard’s family should have benefited economically from the empire. His paternal grandparents, Benjamin and Isabella Woolf, grew up in the East End of London, Ashkenazi Jews, whose forebears came to London in the late eighteenth century. Benjamin Woolf was a successful tailor, opening shops in the fashionable West End of London. Raised as an orthodox Jew, he became a member of a Reform congregation in London. His son, Sidney, became a very successful barrister. This emulated a common English progression, from trade to the professions, with the significant difference that these particular families were Jewish. Jews were being increasingly accepted, up to a point, in English society—perhaps best symbolized by their being able to sit in parliament as of 1858. They were, it might be said, “in but not of,” not “one of us.” Leonard’s mother, Marie de Jongh, had been married before but was widowed when very young. Her future husband was an executor of her late husband’s will; the two families were also intermarried. Though the de Jonghs were somewhat grander than the Woolfs, both families were financially prosperous, and both had had homes in the Bloomsbury district of London. In the opening of his autobiography, Leonard struck the theme that would be so much part of his life, that he was both an “insider” and an “outsider.” As he points out, he is writing looking out upon the Sussex countryside with which he deeply identified, in the parish where he served as its hard working clerk as well as many other local posts. But he was also a Londoner. Through his education he strongly identified with the classical tradition, “the Greece of Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Pericles” (Sowing, 13). Yet his actual ancestors so many years before had come from Persia or Palestine.
Another question to be considered in a study of his life is the position of Jews in English society. Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 and were readmitted in 1656. They occupied, it is fair to say, a somewhat ambiguous position in English society and to a certain degree still do. This was certainly reflected in Leonard's life and is particularly striking in his relation to the Bloomsbury Group and his wife, Virginia. Like other religious groups over time, notably Roman Catholics and those Protestants who were not members of the Church of England, not to mention middle-class and working-class English men and eventually women, Jews were granted political rights and would appear to have become full members of the English nation. But not quite. This is strikingly encapsulated in the life of Benjamin Disraeli, the great nineteenth-century prime minister. Jews could not be members of parliament until 1858, when MPs were allowed to take their oath swearing on either the Old or the New Testament, not just the New. As Disraeli had become a Christian in his early teens, his own political career was not restricted by his having been born Jewish. He was the beneficiary of English legalism. At the same time, that did not prevent him from being perceived as Jewish, and attacked as such. Although Leonard never converted to Christianity, being a non-believer, he was completely non-observant from an early age. That did not preclude others, including those closest to him within the Bloomsbury Group, as regarding Jewishness as being an important part of his character and not necessarily in a positive way. And he himself felt that being Jewish was a central factor in shaping his character.
Jews were a little bit apart, perhaps more likely to be identified as such than members of other religious groups, whether or not the particular individual was religious. What has been called “civilized intolerance” or what one might characterize, paradoxically, as benign anti-Semitism can be seen as an abiding characteristic of English society, although it became less so in reaction to the rise of the Nazis. Although Leonard was an atheist from an early age, he was always known as a Jew. This was true, even though, as far as we know, he was neither involved with Jewish issues, nor influenced in his opinions because he was a Jew, although towards the end of his life, perhaps somewhat to his surprise, he looked favorably upon Israel.
By chance, he was born at the time that Jewish issues were coming more to the fore in English society. In the course of his life he does not seem to have been much concerned with these questions, even though they may have affected how he was viewed by others. His forebears had established themselves before the great migrations that took place from Eastern Europe in the latter years of the nineteenth century. At the time of his birth there were approximately 35,000 Jews in England. Previously immigration to England had not created a problem. But, starting in the 1880s and for the rest of the century, there was an influx of approximately 150,000 East European Jews. In reaction to this, parliament in 1905 passed the Aliens Act imposing some restrictions on immigration. The growth of the Jewish population presented something of a dilemma for the existing Anglo-Jewish community. On the one hand, many of them wanted to be helpful to their co-religionists. On the other, as the recent arrivals were poorer and far less assimilated than themselves, the older residents were deeply concerned that the immigrants would cause problems in the relation of the English Jews to the wider community. The newer arrivals tended to be more politically radical, a position for which Leonard might have had some sympathy, although his politics did not move particularly leftwards until he returned from Ceylon at the age of 30. But as far as one knows he had little connection with any Jewish political groups. He certainly became socially concerned and involved with questions of poverty, particularly under the influence of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. But there is no indication that he took any special interest in the situation of his co-religionists. Although Jews tended to congregate in the same areas, the poor in the East End, the better-off in Golders Green, the Woolfs themselves at the time of his birth lived in fashionable Kensington. Unlike their European brethren, Jews had never been restricted as to where they might live when they returned to England in the seventeenth century. There may not have been any official anti-Semitism, but that did not mean there was no discrimination against Jews. Consequently it is frequently hard to comprehend how deep anti-Semitism is in England. The Jews of England almost seem to have made a contract with the state. In return for being allowed to get on with their lives without restriction, they pledged themselves not to make trouble and agitate against perceived discriminations. Those who had arrived before the 1880s had to a considerable degree integrated themselves into English society.
In a somewhat negative way, Leonard was deeply concerned with spiritual questions. He points out at the beginning of his autobiography that he totally lacked a sense of sin, despite his awareness that the object of the Day of Atonement was to seek pardon for one’s sins. He found it very difficult to apologize for anything he had done, although he fully recognized that at times he may have behaved badly. In terms of religion, the family was observant; his mother regularly attended religious services on the Sabbath, but his father went only on major holidays. He also served as a warden at the Reform West London Synagogue. His sons received tutoring in Hebrew from an apparently incompetent teacher. A year after Leonard was confirmed at the Synagogue in 1893, he informed his mother that he would have nothing further to do with religion, that he was an atheist. This caused some tears on his mother’s part but not profound upset. Nevertheless, in subsequent years he did occasionally go to synagogue, perhaps in the interest of family peace, and he kept in fairly close contact with his family, particularly his mother, often to Virginia’s irritation. His mother was a powerful figure who did much to keep the family together after her husband’s early death. She was a conventional yet strong-minded woman, and Leonard did not depict her in a favorable light in his novel The Wise Virgins. Leonard and his siblings all married non-Jews. (Only his brother Cecil, who was killed in the First World War in his twenties, did not marry.) He never denied being Jewish and was, despite being a non-believer, continually referred to as Jewish, which sometimes made him self-conscious. But, as far as he could tell, he was never discriminated against, although he was occasionally the target of anti-Semitic slurs by some of his closest friends, as in letters Clive Bell wrote to Lytton Strachey. In his autobiographies he did not record any anti-Semitic incidents. He may have suppressed these memories, for certainly at his secondary school, St Paul’s, Jewish students were bullied even more than other pupils. He wrote amusingly about God, noting that, if he existed, his position had become much less powerful, having shifted from being an absolute to a constitutional monarch. From an early age he was committed to the idea of rationality, that one was a free agent, not hobbled by any idea of sin. It was not through any sense of atonement or duty that he felt obligated to do good in the world.
Sidney Woolf died of tuberculosis and heart failure in 1892, at the age of 48, leaving nine children ranging in age from 3 to 16. Leonard, the third eldest, was only 11. The eldest was Leonard’s sister Bella, to whom he would be closest and who was the most literary of his siblings, publishing children’s books and guides to Ceylon. Sidney Woolf’s death was a terrible blow and helped to influence Leonard’s pessimistic view of life. His father had become a very successful barrister, a Queen’s Counsel at a young age, one of only 175 bearing that distinguished title when he was appointed. But he left a comparatively small estate. Despite Leonard being so young when his father died, Sidney was important in shaping the person he became. The family income was much reduced, and they moved from Kensington to Putney, a modest London suburb. In memory of their former glory, their new house was called “Lexham,” the street on which they had lived in Kensington. Leonard had been born into the higher levels of the middle class, but now he would need to win scholarships in order to maintain his class position. While class position in England does not depend entirely on income, money obviously plays an important role. In his reduced economic circumstances it was necessary to reinforce that position through education. The family was under strain, but even in Putney they still employed three servants, in contrast to the many they had had in Kensington. In a way the experience encapsulated what was to happen to middle-class families in the course of the twentieth century as the number of servants they could afford to employ declined. In Principia Politica, Leonard, citing the nineteen family servants in Kensington, provides a rich picture of the luxury of upper-middle-class life in England before the First World War, the hierarchy of servants running from governesses and tutors to boot blacks. Equally surprising, considering how involved his life was to be with political questions, was how unaware of politics he was when he was growing up. Yet his experience of the intense class hierarchy of his early days may ultimately have informed his later commitment to socialism, even though those in his family’s employ were treated well. He felt very secure in his nursery world, and that solid early upbringing helped to build a sense of assurance, combined, paradoxically, with insecurity because of the family’s later financial situation. Even so, when quite young he observed some working-class processions in the local streets. Occasionally a derelict or mad person, emerging from a poorer part of London, would misbehave in a neighboring street in Kensington and instill fear in Leonard, some sense of the abyss that might exist beneath the security of late-nineteenth-century England. But, on the whole, he was in a cocoon of middle-class life, even after Sidney’s death, when the family was far less well-off and had to watch its expenditures carefully. He was old enough to be aware of the seriousness of the situation.
His father’s death inadvertently led to the forming of his central belief system. “From that moment a kind of unchildlike seriousness came into my life, a sense of responsibility and of the insecurity of material things, like houses, food, money. It did not make me unhappy or, after the first shock, worry me” (Sowing, 84) Yet within a few years, influenced by the family’s reversal of fortune, he acquired a rather grim
sense of fundamental insecurity, and a fatalistic acceptance of instability and the impermanence of happiness. This fatalism has given me a philosophy of life, a sceptical faith which stood me in good stead in the worst moments of life’s horror and miseries. For just as, though I believe passionately in the truth of some things, I believe passionately that you cannot be certain of the absolute truth of anything, so too, though I feel passionately that certain things matter profoundly, I feel profoundly in the depths of my being that in the last resort nothing matters. The belief in the importance of truth and the impossibility of absolute truth, the conviction that, though things rightly matter profoundly to you and me, nothing matters—this mental and emotional metaphysic or attitude towards the universe produced the sceptical tolerance which is the essential part of civilization and helps one to bear with some decency or even dignity the worst of Hamlet’s slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. (Sowing, 86)
It was part of what he called his “carapace,” his defense against the blows that the world might inflict upon him. On the other hand, perhaps because he was a non-Christian, he lacked a sense of sin, a sense of guilt. Like his father, he was capable of judging himself as well as others rather harshly. In a significant way, his carapace might also have served, almost unconsciously, as his way of deflecting, indeed virtually ignoring, anti-Semitism.
He enjoyed the traditional education of his class. From 1892 to 1894 he went to a prep school, Arlington House, in Brighton, which his elder brother, Herbert; also attended; the headmaster kindly admitted the two boys, and the other brothers in turn, at lower fees to compensate for the family’s reduced circumstances. There Leonard excelled at sport and acquired a permanent love of games, and doing them with style. His interest and ability in sport compensated for whatever unpopularity his braininess and Jewishness might have caused him. Looking back, he found his early education tedious and anti-intellectual. But, as at home, he reveled in the experience of reading for pleasure.
In 1893 he became a pupil at the eminent London public school St Paul’s. John Colet, friend of Erasmus and Thomas More, founded the school in 1509. Though obviously Christian-based, named for and physically next to the great cathedral, it was also somewhat secular. It was administered by the Mercers, one of the great livery companies of the City of London. Along with Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and Westminster, it was at the time Leonard went there, and has continued to be, one of the best-known and most highly regarded schools in England. It had been willing to admit some non-Christians and has had notable Jewish pupils. The decade after Leonard, the publisher Victor Gollancz and in subsequent years Isaiah Berlin, Oliver Sacks, and Jonathan Miller among many others attended the school. Nevertheless, there was anti-Semitism at St Paul’s that was even more vicious than the appalling bullying that seems to take place at so many schools. The novelist Compton Mackenzie, a contemporary of Leonard’s, would write admiringly about him in their school days, yet he nevertheless recorded how he tormented his Jewish fellow students:
It was my delight to put drawing pins with the sharp end up on the seats of Semitic school-desks. It was my delight to stick the lids of these desks with gelatine lozenges and watch the way the lid would come up with unexpected force and strike a Semite chin. It was my delight to be a unit in two lines of exuberant young Nordic companions lined up on either side of a corridor in St Paul’s School and when some timid, book-laden young Jew passed along on the way up to his class-room to push him from side to side all the length of those grinning rows of boys until his books were scattered on the floor.…I thought it extremely funny when some much admired athletic seniors plunged a young Jew head foremost into a tub of butter rashly left outside the school tuckshop. I derived a warm feeling of patriotism from seeing a young Jew bounced up and down on one of the drums of the Cadet Corps until the parchment burst and was left to explain, without sneaking, to the authorities what had happened.…Looking back on that silly anti-Semitism manifested with all the crudity of savage boyhood, I recognise that the fundamental cause of it was resentment at the way our Jewish schoolfellows used to sacrifice everything to reach the top of the class.2
The ultimate aim of an English public school was to produce an English gentleman, a position that in the view of most at the time a Jew would have a considerable challenge to achieve.
In Mackenzie’s 1937 novel The East Wind of Love, the central character terminates his friendship with Emil Stern, based on Leonard, in part because he is a Jew and his schoolfellows taunt him about the friendship. Mackenzie depicts Stern as having the looks and athletic skills that would have made him very popular had he not been Jewish. The religious atmosphere of the school in its rather superficial nature is captured in Mackenzie’s description of school prayers, from which the Jewish students, along with the few Catholics and some others, were exempted:
As a Catholic [Fitzgerald waited] outside the swinging glass-panelled doors together with two or three of his co-religionists, some fifty Jews, and about half a dozen members of the more rigid Nonconformist sects while the Latin prayers were read by the Captain of the School to the six hundred odd members of the Anglican Communions mustered in the Hall. So far as any religious atmosphere existed at the official Prayers, the Catholics and the Jews and the Plymouth Brethren might have joined their schoolfellows without the slightest religious offence, since it would have been safe to wager that not one boy in the Hall could have said what the special prayers for the day were for, albeit by sheer repetition over hundreds of days, the Pater Noster and the concluding Gratia Domini were imprinted with meaningless verbal accuracy on their memories. The masters standing in the aisles looked over their mortar-boards with countenances that aimed at expressing a courteous piety, a kind of noblesse oblige towards Almighty God; the boys stared blankly before them save where here and there an irrepressible youth convict-wise murmured through motionless lips a witticism or a criticism to his neighbour.
It is here that Mackenzie introduces Stern, who is befriended by the central character, Ogilvie, presumably based on the author himself:
Stern was the nearest creature in St James’s to a prodigy. He was not yet sixteen, and small for his age.…He was not yet developed enough physically to be called a handsome boy, though to proclaim him pretty were an insult to that finely carved pale face more Greek than Semitic, to those heavy-lidded large lustrous eyes and scarlet upcurving bow of mouth. His skin seemed nearly translucent like fragile porcelain, his hands white and light and trim as feathers.…A Gentile half as attractive as Stern would have won the glances of every ambitious young amorist in the school, but being a Jew he was disregarded. As for his cleverness, there were clever and industrious Jews at the top of every form on the classical side of St James’s, and Stern’s ability to write Greek Iambics…was attributed by his class-mates to the capacity for unlimited swotting that every Jew possessed and not at all to the inspiration of poetic genius.3
The third main character in the novel is Fitzgerald, a Catholic of Irish descent. It is intriguing that Mackenzie would have made the three into something of outsiders, a Jew, a Scot (Ogilvie), and an Irish boy. For a while Ogilvie terminates his friendship with Stern in part because he is a Jew and his schoolfellows taunt him about the friendship, but by the end of the volume they are very good friends, Ogilvie having spent some weeks with the Stern family in France. Mackenzie alters some details, making Stern 15 in 1899 when Leonard was 19, giving him just one sibling, a brother, Julius, who is a musical prodigy. Stern is depicted as very much the intellectual, argumentative and strong minded and while in France very much, as was Leonard, a supporter of Dreyfus.
It is not clear why and how St Paul’s was selected, but presumably it was both more congenial and less expensive than a boarding school, as he could live at home. Also he secured a scholarship, traditionally one of the 153 available reproducing the number of Jesus’s “miraculous draught of fishes.” The school had moved in 1884 from being next to St Paul’s to a sixteen-acre site in Hammersmith; Leonard would bicycle there the three miles from Putney. He found the school, as shaped by its High Master, F. W. Walker, limited in its intellectual depth. As with the other prominent public schools during the century, the schools had become national institutions designed to train young men for successful careers in banking or family businesses or the military or the Church, but also frequently in ruling the state and the empire as civil servants. Walker’s aim was to create brilliant classical scholars. The brightest boys were groomed to win major scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge colleges, preferably Balliol at Oxford and Trinity at Cambridge. Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of Balliol, had been a student at St Paul’s. Particularly after the civil service was opened in 1870 to a meritocracy, admitted to its ranks by examination, members of the middle class could become highly competent servants of the state at home or abroad. It was firmly held that the study of the Classics was the best way to train the mind and the character for such work. It is striking that, although it was at this time that Leonard had renounced Judaism, he characterized himself during his St Paul’s years as a bristly Hebrew character, a combination of Jekyll and Hyde. He also became aware of himself as an intellectual; he enjoyed using his mind, on mathematics and the Classics, and deriving aesthetic pleasure from poetry, art, and increasingly music. But he also became more aware of what might be considered a paradox. In his view, the chief culprit in the denigration of the mind was where the most prominent boys in the country were trained, the public school. This was because of its philistinism, its hatred of the “swot,” even though it was their accomplishments that gave the school prestige through the scholarships they won at Oxford and Cambridge. Leonard’s ability at and love of games largely protected him from bullying. As Mackenzie reveals, he was probably taunted at times for being Jewish. He does mention being called a “dirty Jew.” Then, and for many years after, English people were not reluctant to make derogatory remarks about Jews, and more often than one might think when Jews were present. Nonetheless, Leonard maintained, perhaps accurately, that being Jewish did not act as an impediment to his career.
He did feel that at the school the masters, despite teaching academic subjects, had a philistinism deeply ingrained within them. There was an exception: one of his teachers, A. M. Cook, took a special interest in him, encouraged him intellectually, and treated him as a fellow adult. With his encouragement, Leonard read Montaigne, Sterne, and Ibsen, and jotted down in his notebook quotations from such authors as Tolstoy and Meredith. Cook gave him as a prize for being first in writing a grandly bound copy of Francis Bacon’s essays. Mackenzie recalls conversations with Leonard bemoaning the school’s philistinism, but he himself does not mention this in his own autobiography. He also met young writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and E. C. Bentley, both of whom had recently been at St Paul’s and who invited him to join a small political debating society consisting of recent graduates of the school and a few current pupils. Both Chesterton and especially his younger brother, Cecil, an exact contemporary of Leonard’s at St Paul’s, were later known as prominent anti-Semites. Yet in Leonard’s time, three of the four current students in the debating society elected with Leonard were Jewish, with Cecil as possibly the one Christian. He did not overlap with another prominent St Paul’s socialist, G. D. H. Cole, who was nine years younger. Duncan Grant was at the school for two years, but, being five years younger, even if they had been there at the same time, they would not have known one another. They would eventually be virtual brothers-in-law.
Leonard’s classical education shaped his lifelong commitment to truth and justice. In many senses he was having the not-uncommon experience of some rebellious members of the middle class, educated at public schools, learning the knowledge and skills that enabled them to become reformers, to fight the system that the schools themselves so clearly represented. Probably more than at Cambridge, it was at school that his idealization of classical Greece was acquired. One might say that the spiritual ideas for his entire life were developed at St Paul’s, a fusion of his Hebraic principles with Hellenist cultural values. Despite its many palpable defects, English private education could perform valuable work in providing the tools that would support a rich intellectual life. Leonard went on to become a prolific and adept writer, skills that were formed in the relentless translations and essay writings that took place at school and would continue at university, most particularly in the papers that he would present to the Cambridge discussion society, the Apostles. In March 1899 he sat the scholarship examination at Trinity College, Cambridge. He had not taken the exam the previous autumn, when other Paulines had done so. He had been ill, and the spring exam was mostly for students already at the college. He felt isolated; it was one of the worst experiences of his life, entering a totally new world alone and miserable. He did not win the major scholarship that Walker expected of him and for which he had been crammed by Walker’s son. But he was awarded an exhibition, a smaller scholarship, and he could then afford to become an undergraduate member of Trinity College. The following March he managed to win a full foundation scholarship. He had to be careful with money, but he had enough to get along at Cambridge. He was set on a standard path to have a successful career, whatever he might choose to do. Cambridge would change his life but not in anticipated ways.