Victoria, Lady Welby - Life

Life

Welby was born to the Hon. Charles Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie and Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, and christened Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa Stuart-Wortley. Following the death of her father in 1844 she travelled widely with her mother, events she recorded in her diary. Following the death of her mother in Syria in 1855 she returned to England and stayed with her grandfather the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle. In 1858 she moved to Frogmore to live with the Duchess of Kent, who had been a friend of her mother. On the death of the Duchess she was appointed a Maid of Honour to her godmother, Queen Victoria.

In 1863 she married Sir William Earle Welby-Gregory, 4th baronet (1829–1898), who was active in British politics, and by whom she had three children. (Their daughter Nina married Edwardian rake and publisher Harry Cust.) She and Sir William lived together at Denton Manor in Lincolnshire.

Once her children were out of the house, Welby, who had had little formal education, began a fairly intense self-education that included mixing, corresponding, and conversing with some of the leading British thinkers of her day, some of whom she invited to the Manor. It was not unusual for Victorian Englishmen of means to become thinkers and writers (e.g., Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Lord Acton, J.S. Mill, Babbage). Welby is one of the few women of her place and time to do the same.

Her first publications were on Christian theology, especially the interpretation of the Christian scriptures, and this was the subject of her first book, Links and Clues (1881). Her early publications were little read and noticed, and her wondering why this was so led her to language, rhetoric, persuasion, and philosophy. By the late 19th century, she was publishing articles in the leading English language academic journals of the day, Mind and The Monist. She published her first philosophical book, What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Significance in 1903, following it with Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretive Resources in 1911. In the same year she contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica a long article titled "Significs", the name she gave to her theory of meaning. Her writings on the reality of time culminated in her book Time As Derivative (1907).

What Is Meaning? was sympathetically reviewed for The Nation by the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, and this led to an eight year correspondence between them, one that has been published three times, most recently as Hardwick (2001). Welby and Peirce were both academic outsiders, and their approaches to language and meaning had some things in common. But most of the correspondence consists of Peirce elaborating his related theory of semiotics. Welby's replies did not conceal that she found Peirce hard to follow, but by circulating copies of some of Peirce's letters to her, she did much to introduce Peirce to British thinkers. Contemporary Peircians have since returned the favour by being sympathetic students of Welby's ideas.

C. K. Ogden began corresponding with Welby in 1910, and his subsequent writings were very much influenced by her theories, although he tried to minimise this fact in his best-known book, The Meaning of Meaning (1923). She also corresponded with William James, F. C. S. Schiller, the Italian pragmatists Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni, Bertrand Russell, and J. Cook Wilson.

Welby's varied activities included founding the Sociological Society of Great Britain and the Decorative Needlework Society, and writing poetry and plays.