13 - WILLIAM STANLEY JEVONS

Summary

Stanley Jevons was born in the year after Malthus's death. But he was only seven years senior to Marshall and ten years senior to Edgeworth. Professor Foxwell lectured in his stead at University College before Jevons took up his professorship there. He examined my father in the Moral Sciences Tripos of 1875, his name being known to me from my early years as, in my father's mind, the pattern of what an economist and logician should be. Thus, though we celebrate to-day (a little late) the centenary of his birth, though it is sixty years ago that Professor Foxwell lectured in his stead and more than fifty years since his death; nevertheless, Jevons belongs to the group of economists whose school of thought dominated the subject for the half-century after the death of Mill in 1873, who are the immediate teachers and predecessors of ourselves here assembled to pay our duty to his memory.

His family belonged to the class of educated non-conformists, who, without academic connections, made up, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the intelligentsia of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, and became the backbone of Bentham's foundation (in 1826) at University College, London, and of Owens College, Manchester (founded in 1846). The family, and many of their connections, were Unitarians; and in substance Stanley Jevons remained of that faith to the end of his life.