William Stanley Jevons - Background

Background

Jevons was born in Liverpool, in the UK. His father, Thomas Jevons, a man of strong scientific tastes and a writer on legal and economic subjects, was an iron merchant. His mother Mary Anne Jevons was the daughter of William Roscoe. At the age of fifteen he was sent to London to attend University College School. He appears at this time to have already formed the belief that important achievements as a thinker were possible to him, and at more than one critical period in his career this belief was the decisive factor in determining his conduct. Towards the end of 1853, after having spent two years at University College, where his favourite subjects were chemistry and botany, he unexpectedly received the offer of the assayership to the new mint in Australia. The idea of leaving the UK was distasteful, but pecuniary considerations had, in consequence of the failure of his father's firm in 1847, become of vital importance, and he accepted the post.

He left the UK for Sydney in June 1854, and remained there for five years. At the end of that period he resigned his appointment, and in the autumn of 1859 entered again as a student at University College London, proceeding in due course to the B.A. and M.A. degrees of the University of London. He now gave his principal attention to the moral sciences, but his interest in natural science was by no means exhausted: throughout his life he continued to write occasional papers on scientific subjects, and his intimate knowledge of the physical sciences greatly contributed to the success of his chief logical work, The Principles of Science. Not long after taking his M.A. degree Jevons obtained a post as tutor at Owens College, Manchester.

In 1866 he was elected professor of logic and mental and moral philosophy and Cobden professor of political economy in Owens college. Next year he married Harriet Ann Taylor, whose father, John Edward Taylor, had been the founder and proprietor of the Manchester Guardian. Jevons suffered a good deal from ill health and sleeplessness, and found the delivery of lectures covering so wide a range of subjects very burdensome. In 1876 he was glad to exchange the Owens professorship for the professorship of political economy in University College, London. Travelling and music were the principal recreations of his life; but his health continued to be bad, and he suffered from depression. He found his professorial duties increasingly irksome, and feeling that the pressure of literary work left him no spare energy, he decided in 1880 to resign the post. On 13 August 1882 he was drowned whilst bathing near Hastings.

Throughout his life he had pursued with devotion and industry the ideals with which he had set out, and his journal and letters display a noble simplicity of disposition and an unswerving honesty of purpose. He was a prolific writer, and at the time of his death he occupied the foremost position in the UK both as a logician and as an economist. Alfred Marshall said of his work in economics that it "will probably be found to have more constructive force than any, save that of Ricardo, that has been done during the last hundred years." At the time of his death he was engaged upon an economic work that promised to be at least as important as any that he had previously undertaken. It would be difficult to exaggerate the loss which logic and political economy sustained through the accident by which his life was prematurely cut short.

Stanley Jevons was raised a Christian Unitarian, and excerpts from his journals indicate he remained committed to his Christian beliefs until death. After dying in 1882 from accidental drowning, he was buried in the Hampstead Cemetery.