Victoria, Lady Welby

Victoria, Lady Welby (27 April 1837 – 29 March 1912), more correctly Lady
Victoria, Lady Welby
Welby-Gregory,[3] was a self-educated English philosopher of language,
musician and watercolour artist.

Contents
Life
Significs
Bibliography
Notes
Further reading
External links

Life Photograph by G.C. Beresford

Born 27 April 1837
Welby was born to the Hon. Charles Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie and Lady
London
Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, and christened Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa
Stuart-Wortley. Following the death of her father in 1844, she travelled widely Died 29 March 1912
with her mother, and recorded her travel experiences in her diary. When her (aged 74)
mother died on their travels in Syria in 1855, she returned to England to stay London Borough of
with her grandfather, John Manners, the 5th Duke of Rutland, at Belvoir Castle. Harrow
In 1858 she moved to Frogmore to live with a friend of her mother's – the Era 19th-century
Duchess of Kent, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Queen Victoria's philosophy
mother. On the death of the duchess she was appointed a maid of honour to her
Region Western philosophy
godmother, the Queen herself.
School British Pragmatism[1]
In 1863 she married Sir William Earle Welby-Gregory, 4th baronet (1829–1898),
Main Philosophy of
who was active in British politics. She and Sir William lived together at Denton interests language, logic
Manor in Lincolnshire. They had three children, including a daughter, Nina, who
Notable Significs
married Edwardian rake and publisher Harry Cust.
ideas
Once her children were grown and had moved out of the house, Welby, who had Influences
had little formal education, began a fairly intense process of self-education. This Charles Darwin, F. C. S. Schiller,
included mixing, corresponding, and conversing with some of the leading British Charles Sanders Peirce
thinkers of her day, some of whom she invited to the Manor. It was not unusual
Influenced
for Victorian Englishmen of means to become thinkers and writers (e.g. Darwin,
Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles
Lord Acton, J. S. Mill, Charles Babbage). Welby is one of the few women of her
Kay Ogden[2]
place and time to do the same.
Signature
Her early publications were on Christian theology, and particularly addressed the
interpretation of the Christian scriptures. The first, Links and Clues, was
published in 1881, but like several that followed was little read and noticed. The
process of wondering why this was so led Welby to become interested in
language, rhetoric, persuasion, and philosophy. By the late 19th century, she was publishing articles in the leading English
language academic journals of the day, such as 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. That same year, "Significs", the name she gave to her theory of meaning,
was the title of a long –article she contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica. 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, which 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, Mary Everest Boole, the Italian pragmatists Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni,[4] 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.

Significs
"...every one of us is in one sense a born explorer: our only choice is what world we will explore, our only doubt
whether our exploration will be worth the trouble. [...] And the idlest of us wonders: the stupidest of us stares: the
most ignorant of us feels curiosity: while the thief actively explores his neighbour's pocket or breaks into the
"world" of his neighbour's house and plate-closet". ("Sense, meaning, and interpretation (I)" Mind N.S. V; 1898)

Welby's concern with the problem of meaning included (perhaps especially) the everyday use of language, and she coined the
word significs for her approach (replacing her first choice of "sensifics"). She preferred "significs" to semiotics and semantics,
because the latter were theory-laden, and because "significs" pointed to her specific area of interest, which other approaches to
language had tended to ignore.

She distinguished between different kinds of sense, and developed the various relations between them and ethical, aesthetic,
pragmatic, and social values. She posited three main kinds of sense: sense, meaning, and significance. In turn, these corresponded
to three levels of consciousness, which she called "planetary," "solar," and "cosmic," and explained in terms of a sort of
Darwinian theory of evolution. The triadic structure of her thinking was a feature she shared with Peirce.

Welby's theories on signification in general were one of a number of approaches to the theory of language that emerged in the late
19th century and anticipated contemporary semantics, semiotics, and semiology. Welby had a direct effect on the Significs group,
most of whose members were Dutch, including Gerrit Mannoury and Frederik van Eeden. Hence she indirectly influenced L. E. J.
Brouwer, the founder of intuitionistic logic.
Bibliography
1852 A Young Traveller's Journal of a Tour in North and South America During the Year 1850 (https://archive.org/
details/ayoungtraveller00welbgoog) T. Bosworth.
1881. Links and Clues. (https://archive.org/details/linksclues00welb) Macmillan & Co. Second edition 1883.
1893, "Meaning and metaphor," Monist 3: 510–525. Reprinted in Welby (1985).
1896, "Sense, meaning, and interpretation I" Mind 5: 24–37. Reprinted in Welby (1985). Extract in M. Warnock,
ed., 1996. Women Philosophers. J.M. Dent. ISBN 0-460-87721-6.
1896, "Sense, meaning, and interpretation II" Mind 5: 186–202. Reprinted in Welby (1985).
1897. Grains of Sense. (https://archive.org/details/significanceand00welbgoog) James L. Dent.
1901, "Notes on the 'Welby Prize Essay," Mind 10: 188–209.
1911. Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretive Resources. (https://archiv
e.org/details/significanceand00welbgoog) Macmillan & Co.
1931. Other Dimensions: A Selection from the Later Correspondence of Victoria, Lady Welby. Mrs Henry Cust,
ed. Jonathan Cape.
1983 (1903). What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Significance. John Benjamins.
1985 (1911). Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretive Resources.
Schmitz, H. Walter, ed., John Benjamins.
2001 (1977). Semiotic and Significs: Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby.
Edited by Charles S. Hardwick, with the assistance of James Cook. Texas Tech University Press.

Lectures

"An address delivered by the Hon. Mrs. Welby to the married women of Newton on the first Thursday in Lent,
1872"

Notes
1. James McElvenny, "Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning and early analytic philosophy", Language
Sciences 41:212–221, January 2014.
2. Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein, Oxford University
Press, 2016, p. 3.
3. She never adopted the additional name of Gregory and was always known as Lady Welby
4. She visited them in Italy in 1903: H. S. Thayer, 1968, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism.
P.333.

Further reading
Toennies, Ferdinand, 1901, "Note in response to Welby," Mind 10: 204–209.
Schmitz, H. Walter, 1985, "Victoria Lady Welby's significs: the origin of the signific movement." In Welby (1985).
Schmitz, H. Walter, ed., 1990. Essays on Significs: Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary
of the Birth of Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912). John Benjamins.
Deledalle, Gerard, 1990. "Victoria Lady Welby and Charles Sanders Peirce: meaning and signification" (in A.
Eschbach [ed.] Essays on Significs John Benjamins, 1990)
Myers, William Andrew, 1995. "Victoria, Lady Welby (1837–1912)" in M.E. Waithe, ed., A History of Women
Philosophers vol. 4, Kluwer.
Dale, Russell, 1996. The Theory of Meaning. (http://www.russelldale.com/dissertation/1996.RussellDale.TheTheo
ryOfMeaning.pdf), Chapter 2, "The Theory of Meaning in the Twentieth Century".
Petrilli, Susan, 1999, "The biological basis of Victoria Welby's significs," Semiotica: Journal of the International
Association for Semiotic Studies 127: nn-nn.
King, Peter J., 2004. One Hundred Philosophers. Apple Press,. ISBN 1-84092-462-4
Joseph, John E. 2012. "Meaning in the margins: Victoria Lady Welby and significs". Times Literary Supplement
no. 5686, 23 March 2012, pp. 14–15.
External links
Philosophers: The Hon. Victoria, Lady Welby-Gregory (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/authors/welby-gregory.ht
ml) – short introduction
Nubiola, Jaime, 1996, "Scholarship on the relations between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Charles S. Peirce (http://w
ww.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/nubiola/scholar.htm)" in I. Angelelli & M. Cerezo, eds, Proceedings of the
III Symposium on History of Logic. Gruyter. See the section titled "Peirce's reception in British philosophy: Lady
Welby, Ogden and Russell."
Lady Welby Library (https://web.archive.org/web/20150111233720/http://senatehouselibrary.ac.uk/our-collection
s/historic-collections/printed-special-collections/ladywelby/) – a collection in Senate House Library, University of
London.
Lady Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa Welby fonds (http://archivesfa.library.yorku.ca/fonds/ON00370-f0000443.
htm) an archive of over 5 metres Lady Welby's correspondence, research and reference notes, publications,
poetry, newspaper clippings, and printed material, held at the Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections (htt
p://www.library.yorku.ca/cms/archivesspecialcollections/), York University, Toronto, Canada.
'Authority record: Welby, Victoria, Lady, 1837-1912' (https://atom.library.yorku.ca/index.php/welby-victoria-alexan
drina-maria-louisa-stuart-wortley-1837-1912), containing a list of correspondents, at atom (York University
Libraries' Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections - Holdings Database)
Publications by Lady Victoria Welby (https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Welby%2C+Victori
a%22) at Internet Archive

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